Youth as a sociological category: basic conceptual approaches

The author revises the theoretical and methodological approaches to defining the concept of youth in contemporary social and human science. The study notes the contradiction between the high relevance of youth research in modern science and the lack of clear ideas about the interpretation of this social group. Based on the analysis of classical and modern theoretical works, the author identifies the following four key areas of understanding of youth that have become popular in social and human science: structural and functional, cultural, psychoanalytic, and Marxist. The capabilities and limitations typical of each approach are analyzed, and the prospects for their use are assessed in the context of empirical youth research. The researcher summarizes the analytical advantages and disadvantages of current approaches and offers promising trends towards clarifying the understanding of youth from a sociological perspective.