Research On Civilized Mentality And Its Characteristics Among Teenagers In China

Civilization is both the symbol and the target of the development of human society. Different forms of modern civilizations such as material civilization and spiritual civilization have been formed during the development of mankind's society. Moreover, civilization could be exhibited in many forms such as generally accepted system, social ethics, and norms, custom and so on in a race or particular society. For an individual, civilization could be exhibited with the form of behaviors or habits according with the main culture in a specific society. Furthermore, an individual's civilization behavior is not only limited to social norm, but also is driven by his or her civilization mental characteristics. Therefore, there are two basal paths to research mankind's civilization: one way is to understand the process, characteristics and rules of mankind's civilization development, from a perspective of historical and logical perspectives; the other way is to explore the formation, development, incorporation and function of individual civilization, and the interaction and conversion mechanism between social civilization and individual civilization, from the perspective of human's behavioral and psychological perspectives.The exploration of the origin of mankind self-civilization had began a long time ago, however, scientific research in this field is very limited. Although anthropologists, sociologists and ethics have made great effort to investigate mankind's civilization from the historical and logical perspectives, most of these studies had been limited on discussing the historical evolution, type characteristics, performance and valuation of the civilization based on social community. So far as we know, few studies have been focused on individual civilization. In order to meet the needs of our society, it is urgent to study the civilized mentality among Chinese teenagers. Also studies in this field in China would be a new exploration of research with Chinese characteristics, and would be a new research area for educational psychology.In this study, from the perspective of educational psychology, using integrated research orientation, and adopting the methods used in cultural psychology, ethnopsychology, utilizing open questionnaire investigation, closed questionnaire investigation, expert consultation, case interview, random suffer method, analytical hierarchy process, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis etc., the researcher analyzed the structures of civilized mentality, and the psychological features of civilized mentality among teenagers in modern Chinese cities. This dissertation consisted of 8 sub-research which were (1) an investigation of an open-ended questionnaire of the civilization behavior (2) an close-ended questionnaire of the civilization behavior of teenager (3) analysis of the teenager's characteristics of the civilization behavioral mentality (4) analysis of variance on each variable (5) analysis of influencing factors obtained through expert interview (6) multi-regression analysis for factors influencing teenagers civilized behavioral mental structures, and (7) an interview research on the formation of the mental structures of civilized behavior among teenagers.The conclusions from this study were as the following:(1) The civilized mentality among teenagers was a multi-dimension structure, including kindness to fellowmen, courageously righteousness, etiquette, intelligence, keeping promise, peaceful relations, filial piety, industry and thrift, mutual aid and friendly affection and ecosystem consciousness,(2) The questionnaire of civilized mentality for Chinese teenagers had a good reliability and validity.(3) From high to low, the mean scores of ten dimensions were as the following: Filial piety, kindness to fellowmen, the ecosystem consciousness, keeping promise, etiquette, mutual aid friendly affection, intelligence, peaceful relations, and harmony, industry and thrift, courageously righteousness.(4) The grade had a significant effect on every dimension. At the primary school stage, the students's score increased gradually with the rising of grades. But at the middle school stage, the trend was descending with the rising of grades.(5) The gender had a significant effect on all the dimensions of the civilized mentality but industry and thrift dimension. The scores on "intelligence" dimension were higher for boys, while the scores on other dimensions were higher for girls.(6) The region difference of the civilized mentality of teenagers was only statistically significant in the filial dimension, with the students from southwest and northern student having higher scores than the students from south China.(7) The relationship between the civilized mentality of teenagers and school tradition, class atmosphere was that students learning in a school with good tradition and students in a class with good atmosphere got higher scores, compared with other students.(8) The influence of living environment to teenager civilization behavior is: the students living in residential area had the higher score to the students who had better performance, and the students who were in environments with general(or more good)school tradition ,and the students whose parents' educational level was higher ,and the students from the perfect family. In the bad school tradition and under the family economic income lower circumstance, the students' score had no difference.(9) The effect of parent's educational level on the teen-age civilization behavior was that, in general, the level of the civilized mentality among teenagers was improving with the enhancing of their parents educational level.(10) The effect of family structure on the teen-age civilized mentality was: the performance of the students from perfect or separate family was better than the others'.(11) The students from high-income families performance better all the dimensions.To sum up, this dissertation made some innovation on the following aspects: (1)Based on theoretical hypothesis and literature consulting and the analysis of the questionnaire, we regarded civilized mentality as a system which had complicated structures and had multi-dimensions. (2)《The mentality questionnaire (city version) of the civilized mentality among teenagers》was made, which kept with Chinese culture and matched the standards of Psychological Measurement. (3) The characteristics of civilized mentality among teenagers were analyzed. (4) The influencing factors and working models of civilized mentality among teenagers were analyzed. Based on which, the suggestions to improve mentality of civilized mentality level were put forward.