Nowadays the number of traditional boundary marks that shall
clearly tell if the person already reached adulthood or not is
being reduced. Thus this is not absolutely evident who is in
present-day society considered as adult person. Which
characteristics and signs shall have such adult person? What
does it mean actually the conception of adulthood latterly?
In this thesis I have focused on social representation of the
adulthood concept and adult person, namely in the group of
young people of age between 18 and 25 years that are situated
in the period of life Emerging Adulthood as it is envisaged by
J.J. Arnett. The research combines qualitative and quantitative
approach on its basis is possible to obtain more complex
information about the problems.
Research set consists of 160 respondents that were split on
students, employed students and employed persons (not student).
Based on their responses on the questionnaire containing opened
questions in term of qualitative part I have set together base
categorical and sub-categorical systems of social
representations related to the concept of the adulthood and
those what the adult person can and needn’t, know and doesn’t
know, should and should not.
In terms of quantitative part of the thesis I was investigating
whether among mentioned categories exist mutual statistically
significant relations and further more also whether
statistically significant relations exist between presented
category and status of the respondent as student, employed
student and employed person (not student).
Results of this thesis contain descriptions of discovered
social representations and mutual significant relations.