Investigating Emotional Orientation of Two Generations toward Parents and its Socioeconomic Determinants

Introduction Generations are one of the most important forces of change in societies so that as long as new generations emerge, new values and norms emerge inevitably. Iran has experienced great socioeconomic and cultural changes during recent decades. Generations must not be viewed just as a challenge to solidarity of society. From a functional view, dynamics of generational succession may be considered as a mechanism through which society finds its balance between stability and change. Mannheim believes that without generations there would not be any changes in society. In the eye of Mannheim and Comte social changes emerge in the hand of new generations. It is in the modern era that the changing orientations of generations emerge more eminently. Relative to pre-modern era, in modern period social changes occur more rapidly, widely and intensively (Giddens, 1990). Furthermore in spite of pre-modern time - in which children marry as soon as they attain puberty-children experience a new period of adolescence which is defined by more social mobility, and mostly getting away of family. In a developing society like Iran in which modernizing forces have caused great socioeconomic changes; the youth are a big part of population so that it has one of the youngest age structures all over the world; in less than three decades has experienced immense events such as revolution and war, the study of generations’ values sounds to be necessary. In the present study we investigate the emotional orientation of two generations toward their parents. For this we follow four purposes: 1- Description of emotional orientation of individuals toward parents, 2- Investigation of the effect of value orientation of emotional orientation across two generations. 3- Investigation of the relationship of structural dimension of generational relations and emotional orientation of generations. 4- Investigation of the relationship of functional dimension of generational relations and emotional orientation of generations. 5- Examination of the influences of socio-economic variables on emotional orientation of generations toward parents. In this study we distinct two generations according to age variable. In macro level this division is in accordance with an important event –imposed war. The formative years (Schuman and Scott, 1984) of younger generation were influenced by war consequences while the older generation managed war and directly experienced it. Materials and Method The context of