Functions and composition of family event groups

Glavkov their purpose - to make this or that event possible in the life of the individual, to testify the fact of its implementation, not only to write the accomplished event into the biography of the person himself, but also to make him a socially significant fact of the life of other people.

Traditionally, such functions are implemented with the help of a system of rituals and rituals, which accompany every significant event in the life of a person. Rites of birth, initiation and initiation, anniversaries and weddings, funerals and many other ceremonies connected with the cultural and historical traditions of a particular society are some kind of performances played out according to the generally accepted scenarios that pass from generation to generation. Only performers change, but not roles;the composition of the event group is socially prescribed, given from the outside, and the person who is the originator of the celebration has only to play its role in the reproduction of the typical event of a typical life path. However, the more a person is the subject of the life path, the more unique is his life program, the more often he is forced to be both the author, the director, and the executor of his life drama. Individualization makes the life path more flexible, plastic, which can change its direction depending on the author's will and changes in life plans. As a consequence, the circle of people that can become involved in the life of this person is expanding. Whether they become accomplices in its events - largely depends not on entrenched customs and traditions, but on the selective attitude of the subject to them.

Thus, the composition of an event group can be formed in different ways: rigidly prescribed by custom or freely chosen by the person himself. So, birthday, and especially anniversary - one of significant, periodically repeating events. However, note it in different ways. Some consider it obligatory, irrespective of mood and personal attitude, to invite relatives, neighbors, comrades in studies or work and all those persons who have themselves visited at their birthday;others prefer to see in themselves only those who are dear to them today;some remain alone with memories or a book. In the first case, the composition of the event group is prescribed, in the second - due to the whimsical selectivity of the individual. In this regard, it is possible to distinguish between socially-oriented event groups, whose main purpose is to publicly testify the event that has happened, to provide it with social recognition and to bring others closer to life, and personality-oriented event groups that are created by the personality itself, trying to weave in its life significantfor her people.

By its size( number of participants), the event group can vary in a very wide range. So, in the case of a birthday, can participate from one person to several dozen people. A similar picture is found in the analysis of any other event. At the same time, despite the large number of participants in a particular event, not all of them are, from the point of view of the individual, members of its event group. Only important people become such people. Let us turn to some empirical evidence.

Twenty subjects, men and women aged 19 to 42 years, were asked to name the 10 most important events of their lives from the past, present and prospective future. In each event, the subjects had to identify the main actors - other people with whom it is associated( will be related) its implementation. Out of 200 events( 10 from each subject), only eight did not have accomplices. In the remaining 192 events, in addition to the subject himself, from 1 to 6 people participated. The distribution of the detected event groups according to their magnitude was as follows: 39% of the cases had two people( including the subject), 41% three, 14% four, 5% five, 1% six and sevenhuman.

The obtained distribution resembles the data known in social psychology, according to which in most cases the number of members of a small group varies between 2 and 7 for a modal number of 2;in accordance with our results, also data on the distribution of the number of persons associated with each other by mutual sociometric elections. In this connection, the question is: are the event groups isolated by us a kind of informal micro-groups similar to sociometric ones? Of course not, already, because the event groups are not necessarily contact and can include even fictional persons and historical figures."I lived for half a century. .." wrote IA Bunin, "among people who have never been fictitious, worrying about their destinies, their joys and sorrows, as their own, to the grave, having connected themselves with Abraham and Isaac, with pelagians and Etruscans, with Socrates and Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Dante, Gretchen and Chatsky, Sobakevich and Ophelia, Pechorin and Natasha Rostova! And how now to sort out the real and imaginary companions of my earthly existence? How to separate them, how to determine the extent of their influence on me? "

From informal groupings, event groups are also distinguished by the fact that their members must necessarily be significant only for the person whose life the event belongs directly to. The remaining members of this group may even be unfamiliar with each other. A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of an event group is the presence in it of the stellar structure of interpersonal relations, in the center of which is the subject of the event. But he is not an obligatory leader. The main thing is that others are vitally important to him;this is what determines the selection of such, and not of another composition of the event group. This is important to emphasize, since the mandatory condition for informal micro-groups( sociometric "cliques") is reciprocity of elections.

Participants of the event can really be present in the current life situation, but can exercise their influence on the person through the years, decades, centuries. Depending on the time scales, one can distinguish between situational, biographical, and historically significant participants of the event group.

In the first case, a person can become meaningful already thanks to the presence of him in this situation. However, this possibility turns into reality only in cases, if another person is needed in the current situation and in this necessity - the most indispensable among the surrounding people. When you are looking for a Christmas tree on New Year's Eve, even a passer-by with a Christmas tree becomes a situationally significant one: he can point the way to the Christmas tree market, give useful advice, and if he is Santa Claus, even give it to us. It is situationally significant people - necessary and irreplaceable - selected by the person from all the direct participants of the event and are part of the corresponding event group.

Each event is in a certain way connected with other previous and subsequent events of the life of not only this person, but also other people. Changes occurring in the life of others can become causes or consequences, goals or means in relation to a particular event in the life path of the individual. Thinking about our relationships with people who are not indifferent to us, we see a complex system of causal and targeted relationships between events and life lines of different people. A lot of such connecting threads can be easily found by everyone. Parents are beginning to re-learn the basics of science, because the son went to school. And the grandmother at the same time changes her habitual way of life in order to drive her beloved grandson to school and feed him with home dinners.

Thanks to such causal and target dependencies to the life of the person, there are involved a variety of people, even unknown to it. It is about this that the words of the English poet J. Donne: "There is no man who is like an Island, in itself, every man is part of the Mainland, part of the Sushi;and if the Wave blows the coastal cliff into the sea, Europe will be less, and also if the edge of the Cape wipes away or destroys your castle or your friend;the death of every Man diminishes me, for I am one with all of Mankind, and therefore do not ask never for whom the Bell tolls: He is calling for You. "

Together with the experience of a person's connections with the events of his life with the lives of others, a significant relationship with this other appears on a biographical scale.

In this case, another person becomes not only situationally, but also biographically significant. The facts of his life, being the determinants of an event in the life of an individual, indirectly influence other events, its life as a whole. Unlike situationally significant, biographically significant people can therefore enter into not one, but several event groups, regardless of how many events they took part in. Let us give some empirical data.

Based on the results of the study described above, the number of event groups was counted, whose member, from the perspective of the subject, was each named person. Recall: the subjects indicated the 10 most important events of their lives and applied to each listed people who participated in its implementation. It turned out that 79% of these persons participated in only one event, 14% - in two, 7% - in three or more.

It is logical to assume that another person is experienced the more significant than in a greater number of event groups he enters( as they say, do something once - accident, twice - coincidence, thrice - a habit), and the more common the partner as a memberevent group, the more significant it is.

This assumption was confirmed in a small experiment in which 10 people participated. As before, we asked them to name the 10 most important events of their lives and write about each event the names of people whose role in its implementation was( or will be) the greatest. In this way, individual lists of significant others were obtained( an average of 17-18 names recorded on separate cards).The subject took any two cards with names and noted which of the two significant he feels closer to. Similarly, using the method of paired comparisons, the degree of psychological affinity of all other people listed on the individual list was assessed. This allowed us to find out which of these people is psychologically closer to the subject, and who is further.

As expected, than in a greater number of important events for people involved with people with whom he communicates, the closer they become to him. If there is only one such event, then the probability of being among the five closest people is small( 0.37).This probability is slightly higher( 0.40) for those who participate in two events. But if someone is a member of three event groups, then with a probability of 0.71 he becomes one of the five closest people. Thus, the more intertwined lives of different people, the closer people feel each other. How can we see this intertwining - a picture of the common life path, during which meaningful relationships arise?