Semantic space of reality: structural taxonomy of the foundations of self-regulation of interactions in the youth environment

The article provides a conceptual understanding of the semantic space of reality, substantiates its structure and features of its formation in the youth environment. To this end, we consider the process of meaning formation and the content of semantic fields. It is analyzed as the basis for self-regulation of social interactions between young people. Identifying semantic foundations of self-regulation is a relevant research task for both theory and practice. The aim of the study is to identify the structure of relationships and hierarchical clustering of basic elements in the mechanism for self-regulation of social interactions in the youth environment with the help of the structural and taxonomic model. The model was constructed within the framework of the tool for self-regulation of young people's daily life; the tool is being developed at the Center for Youth Sociology, Institute of Socio-Political Research, Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ISPR FCTAS RAS). The structural and taxonomic approach allows us to obtain structural-taxonomic maps that display multi-layered structures of relationships within the mechanism of self-regulation, as well as connections between different meanings that are reproduced and constructed in the youth environment in the process of everyday interactions. In contrast to the automatic classification as the classical task of taxonomy, the structural and taxonomic approach focuses on identifying the structure of the most significant relationships between the objects being classified; such objects (which are considered in the present paper) are the elements of self-regulation mechanism in the life of young people. We design a structural and taxonomic model using the data of a sociological survey; this allows us to offer reasonable descriptions and explanatory interpretations of the results. The analysis is based on the findings of empirical studies we obtained in the course of a survey of Russian youth 15-29 years of age. We use taxonomic analysis to reveal the structure of the semantic space of young people. We conclude that semantic connections within and between semantic fields are ambiguous. Having implemented structural and taxonomic modeling of the semantic space, we identify several levels of semantic fields. Their analysis allows us to form an idea of the semantic foundations of self-regulation of young people's interactions with each other and with society.