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Summary
The book offers a comprehensive review of intergenerational communication. It is divided into a preface, an introduction, six chapters, and concluding comments: Chapter 1 examines theoretical frameworks in the study of intergenerational communication. In Chapter 2, factors of intergenerational communication are discussed. Chapter 3 contains a sociolinguistic study of intergenerational communication and its perception in Russia, and Chapter 4 is a sociolinguistic study of usage and understanding of religious words by people of different ages, Chapter 5 presents examples, problems, and solutions of intergenerational communication; Chapter 6 investigates ways to overcome the intergenerational barrier in communication.
The introduction states that intergenerational communication is a relatively new field in communication research, particularly in Russia, where no major studies based on communication among people of different ages have been published. The author argues that the age of participants is an important factor that influences the frequency and process of communication as well as the interlocutor’s level of satisfaction.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the theoretical foundations of intergenerational communication research: the intergroup theory (Tajfel 1981; Turner 1986), the social exchange theory (Roloff 1981, 1987), the communication accommodation theory (Street & Giles 1982; William & Giles 1996), the communication predicament of aging model (Ryen et al. 1986), and the stereotype activation model (Hummert 1994). Each review presents essential findings in their respective areas of research and discusses them in the light of intergenerational communication research. The author contends that the combination of theories or models can provide an integrated approach to the study of intergenerational communication.
Chapter 2 analyzes some important factors relating to intergenerational communication. It starts with age as a category in historical development, focusing on recent changes in the demographic situation in the world and on the aging population in the lute 20th and 21st centuries. The author then investigates the position of the elderly in post-Soviet Russia and traces alterations in family structure, changes in the status of various groups of people, variations in adaptation to new market realities, and corresponding changes in communication styles. For example, the chapter asserts that changes in the material well-being and status of the Russian elderly may have translated into modifications of intergenerational communication puttems. The chapter examines research on familial intergenerational communication (grandparent-grandchild) and non-familial communication (with police officers, doctors, and educators) in an intergenerational context, highlighting communicative difficulties in various settings and providing examples of communication observed and recorded in Russia, particularly examples of over-accommodation in care-giving and community settings. Previous studies suggest that aspects of intergenerational communication in some East Asian nations may be more problematic than in some Western ones (Giles et al., 2001). The chapter reviews and summarizes research on perceptions of intergenerational communication and compares communication patterns in Western and Eastern countries where scholars noted significant differences in views on communication and aging. The chapter also deals with aging stereotypes and their reflection in intergenerational communication.
Chapter 3 reports on a study of cross-generational communication conducted by the author in 2005 in St. Petersburg, Russia. The research was modeled on recently conducted surveys of intergenerational communication in the US, Britain, and Pacific Rim countries (Williams et al., 1996; Noels et al., 2001; Giles et al., 2001), and was the first to be conducted in Russia. A questionnaire elicited participant’s perceptions of conversations with members of four target groups: the elderly (aged 60 and above), middle-aged people (40-60), young people (20-40), and teenagers (13-20). The participant pool was made up of 260 people living in St. Petersburg. These people were not formally randomly selected, but were a convenience sample of people available and willing to take part in the survey. Consistent with research in other countries, it was found that young Russian respondents under 20 and between the ages of 20 and 30 reported less frequent contact with older respondents (both aged 40 to 60 and above 60 years of age) and more contact with peers than did the older respondents. The oldest respondents (aged 60-70 and 70-80) reported more frequent contact with older targets than they did with young children and teenage groups; they, too, had the most frequent contact with peers. Respondents who perceived themselves as more sociable people reported more frequent communication regardless of age. However, the reported communicative acts happened more frequently with representatives of teenagers and young people; the study did not find any significant correlations between perceived sociability and communication with older people. The results point to a possible trend of selective sociability among our respondents, and the desire to communicate primarily with younger people. At the same time, young Russian respondents were less concerned with making themselves communicatively attractive to older people, probably because their communicative behavior was primarily aimed at communicative accommodation within their own age group. The author labels this phenomenon as a communicative egocentrism among young interlocutors.