‘Core’ and ‘periphery’ of the concepts ‘happiness’ and ‘justice’: Unfinished sentences technique as a means of validation

Abstract

The article continues a series of publications based on the results of a long-term research project of the Sociology Chair of the RUDN University, which combines research and methodological study of the self-identification of Russian students in terms of happiness. At the current stage, two new ‘dimensions’ were added to the project: first, the contextualization of questions about happiness by the concept and elements of social justice (as its ‘external determinant’); second, ‘measuring’ the images of a happy/unhappy person with the projective technique (unfinished sentences) and taking into account social ideas about justice/injustice. Being limited by the size of the article, the authors focus on the second ‘dimension’ - identify the possibilities and limitations of the unfinished-sentences technique as a means for validating the results of the project rather than a means for starting it. The structure of the article contributes to the solution of this task: in the first, introductory part, the author set the research problem as determined by the self-diagnostic mania of the contemporary society (in terms of the level of happiness) and the attempts to classify the factors of happiness; the second part presents the main stages of the project and its conclusions based on the results of the surveys (on the sample of the RUDN University students and on the all-Russian representative online panel); the third, main part presents the results of the unfinished-sentences technique application, which were obtained with the simplest content-analytical coding of the elementary endings. The authors reconstructed a single-type structure of images of a happy/unhappy person (in the context of factors determining such ‘statuses’) and of justice/injustice (taking into account their characteristics) - the core, the near periphery and the far periphery, which differ in their semantic ‘volumes’ and evaluation trends.