European values in the axiological space of modern Ukrainian youth

Abstract

The article provides a brief overview of the theoretical field of socio-humanitarian sciences in terms of definition and features of disciplinary approaches to the study of values as a scientific category. The topicality of sociology is established in this discourse, i.e. it is a comprehensive study of values, which involves their analysis in relation to other elements of the social system, taking into account the current social context. Emphasis is placed on the expediency of creating a theoretical and methodological basis for research by combining consistent provisions of structuralism and hermeneutics as well as the use of qualitative methods relevant to non-classical theorizing. The dialectic of the concepts of world and European values is explained, the correctness of the use of the latter is substantiated. The leitmotif of the article is the idea of a direct relationship between the quality of modernization of Ukraine and the speed of transformation of the axiological space of Ukrainians towards the (Western)European model. Therefore, based on the data of the World Values Survey, the tendencies of modification of the modern axio-sphere of the Ukrainian society in accordance with the changes of the European and world value spaces are analyzed. It is emphasized that in Ukraine there is a slow departure from the still dominant traditional values to the values of secularization and self-expression (according to R. Inglehart). It is most obvious in the value orientations of young people as the most progressive and adaptive socio-demographic group of the population. In view of this, the author studied the value orientations of the I. Franko Lviv National University students to check them on the availability of European values, the specifics of the internalization of the latter and the search for subjects who are their repeaters. It has been established that the state of the value space of the respondents can be characterized as one that is basically specified by a dominant tradition, in which the fundamental values of a united Europe are already slowly being internalized. The determinants of this process are the active transformations of the political and economic situation in the country and the world at the macro-level as well as the influences of the closest surroundings, friends, educational courses, travelling at the meso- and micro-level of the social system.