Research On Time Urgency Of The Contemporary Youth

With the rapid development of China’s modernization,more and more people feel anxious,especially about time.It is important to develop social psychology theories to explain and explore the social phenomenon which has become the feature of our age.The question of this thesis is to explore the characteristics of time urgency of the contemporary youth and find out whether the youth’s time urgency is influenced by the social factors and personal factors.Therefore,this thesis attempts to construct the theoretical analysis framework of the time urgency in the first place.And then this thesis collects the data of 311 young people by questionnaire to describe the urgency of work time,the urgency of family time and the urgency of leisure time,as well as their level.Next this thesis explains whether social factors and individual factors influence the time urgency of youth.Finally,this thesis tests the validity of the framework of the time urgency according to the results of the survey.The data analysis in this thesis is based on bivariate correlations,independent-samples T test,single factor variance analysis and regression analysis.Some conclusions can be drawn from the current data.Firstly,social structure distinguishes itself from institutional-time,interaction-time and self-time by adjusting the tightness of time embeddedness.Moreover,the tightness of time embeddedness is proportional to time urgency of youth and is inversely proportional to the stability of social structure.Secondly,by limiting the effective means to achieve goals in institutional-time,social structure ranks professional roles with different working hours,embeds the ranks into the roles of social life by invading the self-time with work time,and influences the working time urgency of the contemporary youth.Thirdly,social structure can affect the synchronicity of family time of family and professional roles by controlling the means of achieving the goals in interaction-time,and thus makes the youth feel different degrees of family time urgency.Fourthly,leisure time is embedded into roles of social life,family and profession by social structure which limits the means that can achieve goals in self-time,which affects the leisure time urgency of youth.Fifthly,social structure affects social time through three systematic functions which are action expectations,effective means and planning times.Afterwards,the social time is embedded into the roles of profession,family and social life,which impacts on time urgency of the contemporary youth.In conclusion,the time urgency of youth groups is not just caused by personal factors.It is a social psychological phenomenon resulting from the tension of social structure.Therefore,the analysis framework of time urgency proposed in this thesis has been tested,that is,the social structure embeds three systematic functions including adaptation,goal attainment and integration into self-time,interaction-time and institutional-time,the three social time dimensions of social role,and triggers social time urgency.As this thesis has shown,theoretical and empirical research on time urgency has profound implications for understanding the changes of contemporary Chinese society.Time urgency of youth is caused by the tension between individuals and society.On the one hand,the individuals keep rushing into the future,trying to break the existing shackles of time and construct a flexible order of social time.On the other hand,the behavior of individuals has accelerated social changes in every aspects,making it more difficult for individuals to keep up with the rhythm of society and causing time urgency.Although this thesis chooses a suitable research mode according to the research question,it doesn’t analyze each concept in the analysis framework systematically because of the limitation of the operationalization of concepts,selecting indexes,sampling and the resources of time,manpower and finance.Therefore,the main social and individual factors influencing time urgency and the changing process of time urgency of groups can serve as the next research questions for future discussion.