大学生心中父亲形象的结构分析

A Structure Analysis of College Students’ Image of "Father"

心理学角度的父亲形象是指人的记忆和想象中的父亲形象,不同文化背景、不同群体下的人对父亲会有不同的理解。以往国内外的学者都有提出一些关于父亲形象与父亲角色的结构性研究。为了探讨当代大学生心目中"父亲"的概念表征,采用字词联想法与内容分析的方法,进行系统聚类分析。结果发现,"父亲"形象在大学生的心目中可以从以下4个方面进行表征:(1)"依靠性";(2)"情义性";(3)"自律性";(4)"开放性"。

Fathers’ image from the psychological angle includes the one in peoples’ memory and imagination. As a concept with cultural flavor, ＂father＂contains a wealth of content and meaning. During the recent decades, the researches of fathers’ role and image attract scholars’ attention all over the word. The present study discusses the whole picture of fathers’ image in contemporary college students’ mind. The social validity method was divided into two stages. The first stage was a pre-survey in which 231 college students made free associations of ＂father＂ without time limit, so that the researcher could collect words. In order to inspire the students’ association from different aspects, there were five questions related to father on the questionnaire. After that, the researchers used content analysis and frequency statistics to deal with the words the students gave. Of the 43 father-related words/phrases with frequency above 4.7% were collected as units of analysis （Table 1）. The researchers made 5 sets of cards with the 43 high-frequency words and printed a word on the front and a serial number on the back of each card. The second stage was item classification by way of individual surveys. Using a set of cards as a tool, 100 college students were asked to classify the 43 conceptions according to their understanding of ＂father＂ and the relationship of those conceptions. After the classification, the students were required to write the results down and explain their reasons or criteria. And then the researchers carried on the statistics of the times that every two words were identified as the same classification. Finally a 43×43 correlation matrix was built according to the data of the statistics, and cluster analyzed by SPSS15.0. The primary cluster analysis of 8 basic clusters of the image of father, according to the average association strength （from high to low）, included safety, morality, stateliness, affection, adventure, extraversion, self-restraint, maturity （Table 2）. The further cluster analysis showed that there were four representations of ＂father＂ in college students’ mind： （1） reliance; （2） morality-affection; （3） self-discipline; （4） extraversion （Graph 1）. The significance and relationship of the 8 basic clusters and the 4 high-level clusters were discussed in details. This study has set up an elementary structure of ＂father＂ and his image. The innovation of this study is the combination of the word association method with implicit theory to probe the representation of ＂father＂ in contemporary college students. This method reduces the suggestibility and society praise effect, and provides a more real and exact conclusion. Besides, the results not only conform with the image of father in the Chinese tradition, but also show some new characteristics of the modern father. These show the change of the image of father keeps pace with the times.