Image of Social World in Metaphors and Narratives of Adults

Abstract

The image of the social world is a predictor of social behavior and its development during stable social transitivity, i.e., COVID-19 pandemic, economic crises, local military conflicts, etc. It can also be interpreted as a variable linguistic phenomenon. However, very little empirical research has featured its integral structural and content characteristics through the prism of narratives, metaphors, and social representations. The author used the methods of thematic narrative analysis and content analysis of metaphors to identify the narrative constructions used by adult subjects to describe their image of the social world. The data obtained were subjected to frequency analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis. The experiment involved 193 respondents aged 35–49 years old, employed in the city of Rostov-on-Don, Russia. In their metaphors and narratives, they described the social world as balancing between stability and dynamism, predictability and stochasticity, as well as endowed it with differentiation in the absence of universal laws. The rationality of the metaphors reflected the age identity while the subject of biographical narratives reflected the subjective adaptation to current social processes.