2012 Volume 26 Issue 2 Pages 145-158
This study investigates how adolescents in the pre-adulthood perceive their grandparents' engagement toward their socialization. Based on a semi-structured episodic interview scheme, questionnaires were conducted among fourteen male and female undergraduate students, inquiring about (1) the interviewee's favorite grandparent and that reason; (2) the meaning of grandparents' existence for the interviewee; (3) factors thought to have been inherited from grandparents; and (4) memories with grandparents. The analysis was conducted by sorting the descriptions by difference of perceived meaning of the functions of grandparents according to a temporal sequence of the grandchildren's respective life stages from verbatim records of and the interviews. From the analysis, it was observed that playing with grandparents in early childhood promotes the grandchild’s emotional exchange, and the experience of engaging in playful activities enjoyed by the grandparents promotes the grandchild's emotional expression and gender role conception. Grandchildren of school age and in puberty appear to learn sociality not only directly but also indirectly from grandparents as social references while receiving emotional support from the grandparents. Grandchildren in adolescence tend to reform their values by reevaluating the lives of their grandparents through an attempt to accept the aging and death of grandparents. The grandparents-grandchildren relationship consisting of opposite directions of aging and growing are assumed to have contributed to the socialization and emotional development of grandchildren. In addition, negative emotions toward grandparents observed in early childhood appear to directly reflect the parent-grandparent relationship, but they tend to transform into positive perceptions based on the grandchild's multilateral assessments.
