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  • Measuring the Romanticization of Everyday Life on the Example of Content Preferences of Students from Moscow Universities in Social Networks

Measuring the Romanticization of Everyday Life on the Example of Content Preferences of Students from Moscow Universities in Social Networks

Student: Elena Dolmatovskaya

Supervisor: Marina Aleksandrova

Faculty: Faculty of Social Sciences

Educational Programme: Sociology (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2023

The romanticization of everyday life is an actual and spreading social phenomenon that does not yet have a measurement technique and requires scientific study in sociology, since it refers to a broader practice studied by sociologists and has identified links with socio-demographic characteristics and other sociological concepts. The purpose of the current study is to develop and test a methodology for measuring the propensity of university students in Moscow to romanticize everyday life using the example of their content preferences in social networks. The study was implemented using a mixed methods strategy, representing a qual-QIAN design. At the qualitative stage, a qualitative mini-content analysis of the elements of 100 YouTube videos published since 01/01/2020 with the hashtag "Romanticize your life", collected by parsing social media data using the YouTube API, was carried out. At the quantitative stage, an online survey was conducted, in which 298 respondents took part, 259 of whom passed the selection criteria and entered the final sample. Quantitative analysis used methods for checking the presence of a pair relationship, linear regression, cluster analysis, and binary logistic regression with dummy variables. The instrument for measuring the propensity to romanticize everyday life was a five-point Likert scale with piloted methods of interviews and an online survey of 16 representatives of an empirical object, judgments developed based on the results of a theoretical review and a qualitative stage of the study. The final Likert scale, which showed a fairly high reliability and internal consistency with a Cronbach's Alpha value of 0.867, was used to calculate the propensity to romanticize index using the example of content preferences in social networks, and included 10 judgments. The measurement of the phenomenon made it possible to determine some characteristics with which the propensity to romanticize everyday life using the example of content preferences in social networks of students of Moscow universities can be associated: among them, gender, fear of a missing out (FOMO), activity of social networks use, values of universalism and hedonism. The respondents were clustered according to their tendency to romanticize everyday life, and the clusters were described.

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