Social Representations of Family Formation and Parenthood Among Young Adults in Russia

Contemporary societies are undergoing substantial changes in family formation and reproductive behaviour, accompanied by shifts in socially shared meanings of family, marriage, pregnancy, children, and parenthood. This study examined the structural organisation of five related social representations concerning family formation and parenthood among young adults in Russia. The method of free associations and the prototypical analysis of P. Verges were used. The answers were lexically and semantically standardized and combined into semantic categories. The empirical basis was based on the results of an online survey of 364 students and university students aged 17-25 living in Russia, including 218 women (59.9%) and 146 men (40.1%). Data collection was conducted from December 2025 to February 2026. Each participant named three associations for each of the five stimuli. Ideas about family and marriage had mostly positive content: 44.8% and 47.3% of respondents noted love, respectively. Pregnancy and parenthood with many children were more often associated with responsibility and stress: 14.6% and 31.3% indicated physical and emotional stress, respectively, and 24.7% of participants indicated financial stress with parenthood with many children. Social concepts of family, marriage, pregnancy, child, and parenthood share common semantic elements but differ in their structural positions. The results demonstrate the possibilities of a comparative structural approach to study how young people in Russia organize socially shared knowledge about starting a family and future parenthood.

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