Biographical Method as a Way of Getting to Know one’s Life Path on the example of Student Youth in Donbas

Introduction. The psychology of a person’s life path is one of the most dynamically developing areas of psychology, which is constituted by its own subject and the original method of its cognition. The subject of the psychology of life path includes psychological phenomena, mechanisms and patterns of a person's implementation of his own life. It is reasonable to study the life path of an individual as a personality and as the subject of activity via a biographical method. The goal is a theoretical analysis of various approaches to the study of a person’s life path, one of the effective methods of its study being biographical, as well as an empirical study of life forecasting, which allows revealing the prospects for the life path of a student's personality, his needs and expectations from the future during periods of military operations. Materials and Methods. The research employed theoretical analysis of domestic and foreign scientific sources; general scientific methods of theoretical level (analysis, synthesis, systematization, generalization of scientific and theoretical data); empirical methods (biographical method, questioning); methods for processing results (qualitative and quantitative analysis of empirical data). The survey involved 220 students of Donetsk National Medical University named after M. Gorky aged from 17 to 19. The author’s questionnaire composed of 20 questions and biographical methods were used. Results and Discussion. The effectiveness of the biographical method in the study of life prospects of student youth has been investigated. The author describes the features of their life prospects at turning points – biographical events, when there is a constant threat to life, communications are broken, there are no elementary conditions for life, when there are restrictions on the learning process, etc. The life perspective is considered as a holistic picture of the future in a complex and contradictory relationship of programmed and expected events. The emphasis is put on the socio-psychological resources of the individual for building their course of life: stable basic values, reliance on the family, responsibility for one's own life, realism when predicting life events, etc. Conclusions. Biographical methods ensure revealing the prospects for the life path of a student's personality, his needs and expectations from the future, attitude towards the present during periods of military operations. At this stage, student youth may undergo a modification of the previously established image of the future, which affects different areas of their lives.