Techniques of cultural provocation in the study of family and love stereotypes in students' minds

The choice of stereotypical images of love and family, which are represented in minds of young people, identifies the search for appropriate methodical receptions as a subject of our research in the context of social psychology. This article presents such techniques united under the title «cultural provocation». By the cultural provocation we consider a method of introducing as a stimulus -stimulus-means in terms LS Vygotsky - verbal concepts and visual images, the content of which in some cases has a strong association with the theme of love and family, in others - on the contrary, is not explicit. The core of the technique is to provoke differentiation of proposed incentives and finish or "transcribe" unspecified incentives to complete the story. At first, we asked respondents to make a choice among couples of ambivalent stereotypical statements specific to common sense, for example, «Everyone can love» and «Not everyone is able to love». Then we asked them to write a story «Two objects» about things that can happen with two familiar objects. The instruction was not specified. That was followed by the task of making differentiated choice «Images of Love»: it was proposed to the respondents to choose from the set of images (30 images) those images that represents the idea of "love", and then explain their choice. At the end of the process the respondents were invited to write their own version of continuation of the famous Charles Perrault's fairytale «Sleeping Beauty»). While analyzing the results of method of choice of statements, we have identified two groups of respondents: first group is consisted of respondents whose responses are dominated by extremely categorical stereotypical cliches (a group of «extreme»), the other group of the «middle» choices - includes respondents who chose the average value. Results of subsequent tasks correlated with respondents belonging to one of the groups. Results: established significant correlations between the allocation to a certain group - «extreme» or «middle» - and the content of the stories about two subjects and the continuations of the tales. Respondents of the «extreme» group presented intimate-personal relationships from utilitarian and status position (market character orientation by Erich Fromm). The continuations of the tale are usually stereotyped in their performance: «Everything is as it should be». Respondents of the "middle" group presented the problem from the "human -human" position: as containing value-existential problem. The continuations of the tale made by those respondents largely contains original plot. Working with photographs, respondents of the «middle» group at statistically significant level opted for the category «Love of the couple». Moreover, they chose not only positive images, but also images with the problematic (conflicting) content. Respondents of the «extreme» group are more oriented to the positive, smooth plots: «The family - spouses - parents with children», «Wedding» and «Happy old age». In general, this research has confirmed the relevance of the method of cultural provocation in relation to the subject of the research.

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