Sociological Analysis of the Generation Gap in Iran

There are controversies among experts over the exsistence of «Generation gap». Nevertheless، in societies like Iran، that are experiencing great social transformations in structure and values، lack of proper management of the conflicts resulted from these changes in different sectors of the society would potentially set the ground for the occurrence of «generation gap» and in the extreme case «dissociation between generations» and an identity crisis originated from this issue. The present paper aims to analyze the experimental data to identify the status of the generation gap in the current Iranian society using the secondary analysis of the data gathered from the fifth wave of the World Values ​​survey with a sample size of 2667 people and a library-based method for theoretical analysis of this phenomenon. Results indicate that the tendency of adolescents and young adults towards modern values and the sense of identity crisis—as a result of their detachment from previous generations—has gradually been increasing. In case of inappropriate management of the processes of adolescents’ acculturation and young adults’ cultural reproduction by the government and the media، the generation conflict and ultimately generation dissociation would jeopardize future development of the community.