Stressed-out Youth – Participants of Music Festivals and Stress (Evaluation of the Phenomenon among Teenagers and Young Adults)

Purpose: Stress is inseparable part of life. It is an occurrence which influes on individual life, both on health and family and social aspects. Stress is apply to everyone, independently on age, so important is recognition main stressors and ways of copy with stress, especially on young people, and that was the purpose of questionnaire research during music festivals. Method: Author’s questionnaire. We researched 1131 visitors music festivals: Festival name R.Riedla bad Przystanek Woodstock. 45% of them were women and 55% men; medium age +/ – 20 years. Results: Researched people declared their level of stress on 3-4 points in 6-points scale. 2/3 of them claimed that surroundings is a couse of stress. 2/3 young people said that their knowledge about stress is not enough, and only 2% of them use specialized help. In difficult life situations, if they want to cut down their level of stress, they the most often use alcohol. Conclusion: Knowledge about stress is not enough. Women and men have different ways of copy with stress. The most often young people exert passive methods of liquidate everyday difficulties.

The contribution analyzes the most important risks of the present youth subcultures and the opportunities for social work and social pedagogy with regard to the problems of youth subcultures. The basic characteristics of youth subcultures is described as well as their social development, types and forms. The central meaning is inscribed to the possibilities of interdisciplinary coaction of social pedagogy and social work when solving specific problems of youth subcultures in the process of socialization during free time or at the penetration of social deviations. A specific attention is paid to the definition of the professional roles of social workers and social pedagogues in relation to the risky youth subcultures.

Youth councils at local government units in the world – a review of research on selected examples

The article is part of a publication cycle on the activities of youth councils at local government units. The introduction to the publication discusses the current state of research on the issues of youth councils in Poland and in the world, the purpose of the research and the hypothesis. The main part of the article presents examples of the activity of youth councils at local government units that operate not only in Poland or Europe, but all over the world. The publication presents, inter alia, youth councils operating in Great Britain, the United States of America and Canada.

The paper attempts to describe the ludic dimension of students’ free time. My empirical research focused on fun as a form of students’ free time activity. The research question was the following: What is the content of students’ ludic activity? The analysis, conducted in 2004/2005 and 2005/2006, covered 1st, 3rd and 5th year students at the pedagogy course of Szczecin University (N=172). The research used the diagnostic survey method (with an auditorial questionnaire), supplemented with qualitative research techniques (interviews and free discussions, and analysis of essays by students). This paper attempts to describe quantitative and qualitative analyses and interpret research materials collected. The paper includes quotations from students’ opinions, which are used as examples showing the way entertainment is perceived as a past time activity

Youth is one of the riskiest groups at the labour market. Social pedagogy offers historical experience, a theoretical background as well as professional approach to solving youth unemployment. There is a wide range of social and pedagogical interventions into this multidisciplinary problem including preventive counseling, coordination of the school system and the labour market, and criticism and innovation of social changes that would bring help to unemployed youth.

This article comprises a presentation of diagnostic results of research conducted among students from rural schools. The problems mentioned in the study concern the occurrence of omnipresent physical and verbal aggression in youth. The study findings allowed for drawing conclusions for the purpose of pedagogical and preventive measures which may serve for developing an adequate, entirely tailor-made, preventive program, thus ensuring the highest level of effectiveness guarantee.

After Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, social media became a key source of information for young people, surpassing traditional media in terms of speed and accessibility. Research shows that platforms such as Telegram, YouTube, and Facebook are most frequently used by Generation Z to follow war events. This article discusses the importance of social media in shaping young people’s opinions about the armed conflict in Ukraine. According to the authors, social media is the main source of information about the surrounding world for the young generation. Therefore, they should be attributed a significant role in Generation Z’s perception of reality.

The aim of this study was to develop a Political Elite Perception (PEP) Questionnaire with an exploratory mixed research design and to determine university students’ perceptions of university of political elites. At the qualitative stage of the study, a qualitative questionnaire was applied among university students (n = 160). The analysis of the qualitative data revealed that university students’ perceptions of political elites were grouped in seven main categories (intellectual capacity, political values, democratic attitude, personal traits, talents, power/influence, and interaction with the public/public benefits), and the questionnaire items were determined based on these categories. At the quantitative stage of the research, statistical analyses were conducted on the questionnaire that was applied to 383 university students. The study findings demonstrated that, according to the university students, the personal traits of political elites included charisma, courage, and self-confidence, but they also emphasized that political elites were intellectually inadequate, impartial, uncriticizable, unempathetic and non-compromising, and described the political elites as non-democratic.

On the problems of identity formation in adolescence – the borderlines of conceptualizing self-knowledge in the face of crisis

The issue of identity formation during adolescence requires consideration of multiple theoretical perspectives and socio-cultural contexts. Identity, being a dynamic process, is analyzed from the viewpoints of humanistic psychology, cognitive psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology. In this paper, an analysis of contemporary conditions of this process has been undertaken, with a particular focus on risk factors and development determinants. The authors of this text emphasize the significance of early experiences as an identity matrix influencing later mechanisms of integration during adolescence. Referring to E.H. Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, identity crises are presented as natural phenomena that, under certain conditions, can lead to either integration or disintegration of personality. In this context, the difficulties faced by young people in the process of self-creation of the “Self” are highlighted, especially in the face of specific risk factors. Given that experiencing a crisis can be both an opportunity and a threat to development, depending on the support and resources of the individual, the need for prevention and education in counteracting risky behaviors and supporting healthy psychosocial development of youth is emphasized.

Identity and attitudes of academic youth – a Polish-Czech comparative study

The article is a report on comparative studies carried out in the PolishCzech borderland in 2022–2023 among pedagogy students of Polish and Czech universities. The research was placed in the objectivist paradigm and the survey method was applied. The study was aimed at determining the sense of identity of young people, at learning about values, attitudes towards other nations and types of intergroup interactions taking place in the borderland. In order to check whether there are statistically significant differences between the groups in the responses to individual questions, the Mann-Whitney U test was used. In the context of the obtained results, it can be concluded that academic youth from the Polish and Czech parts of the borderland attribute significant importance to belonging to one biological species inhabiting the earth (no statistically significant differences between groups). Polish youth are similar to their peers living in the Czech Republic. The similarities pertain to identification in the system: person – gender – nationality, to positive attitude towards other nations and to values. There are statistically significant differences between the two cohorts in their attitudes towards individual nations and in their assessment of the types of social interactions occurring in the borderland. The specificity and differences have their sources in the sociocultural, political and economic situation of the country in which the young live and in the educational system to which they have been subjected. The future is a never-ending project that is constantly changing. Borderland research is the analysis of contexts in which the construction of the vision and the use of the realities of the existing social space take place. Research on academic youth provides information not only about its condition and the image of contemporary borderland, but also about its desired shape.

This paper deals with the role of needs and specific personality dimensions as determinants of creative (poetic) activity among youth. The study is based on Henry A. Murray and Morris I. Stein’s theory, according to which needs represent forces for action and are classified by the psychologists into primary (viscerogenic) and secondary (psychogenic) ones, or explicit and implicit (hidden) needs. An instrument called Stein’s Self-Portrait (also known as “The Needs and aspirations”) was used to investigate Murray’s system of needs. The structure of personality was measured using the Five Factor Model of Personality (also known as the “Big Five Model”) devised by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae. The model describes five fundamental dimensions (factors) of personality such as: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness. Analysis of the study results reveals a specific hierarchy of needs ( the prevailing ones include creative needs, social needs, the need to seek and enjoy sensuous impressions, the need for achievement and the need for compensation), as well as points to the dominating personality dimensions which correlate with creative activity (openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness).

This article is a theoretical and empirical exemplification of problems connected with the meaning and functions of creative activity in the life of the youth. It has been theoretically assumed that creative activity might be explained by means of two models of creative writing. The first one is the conflict model (auto-therapeutic function) and the second one is the model of fulfilment (self-realisation function). The conflict model dominates in the phase of starting creative activity in the young generation. The empirical analyses concerned creative motivation, purposes of creation, situations that initiate the creative process, subjects for whom young people write and benefits that are the result of the creative process. The analysis did not prove that the conflict model dominated significantly. Creative activity plays both self-realising and auto-therapeutic roles that together constitute the basis for overcoming one’s identity crisis which is typical of adolescence and emerging adulthood.