抄録
The main purpose of this paper is to clarify the motive structure of the Japanese youth. This is done by investigating how young people look at themselves (youth's self-image), how the adults look at young people (adult's image of youth) and, further more, how and why these two images differ.Our subjects were chosen from the following four group; 2 youth groups including students and wage earners and 2 adult groups including university staff and managers. Four kinds of questionnaires were made for each of these 4 groups. All four questionnaires had essentially the same content and all subjects were supposed to answer the questions according to their own images of youth. The questionnaire consisted of three parts. Part I investigated youth's motivation to work and their attitudes towards superiors and peers at school or at place of employment. The items in Part II were concerned with the perception of goals in life and in Part III with how often the subjects participated in group activities.The results were as follows : (1) Students feel more urge to study as they go up from freshmen to seniors. The graduate students work most diligently, while many freshmen and sophomores show much less interest in studying. Workers in small-scale businesses are more personally involved in their work than those in the companies of larger size.(2) Generally, wage earners are more sociable than the students. Graduate students feel lonely more often than the undergraduate students.(3) In general, young people today tent to be concerned only with their onw interests.There is no significant difference between wage earners and students in this respect.(4) University staff view their students as generally being undermotivated. In contrast to this, business management tends to see the youths in their employment as being well motivated, a view which is held more strongly in Japanese industries of larger scale. However, while youths in small-scale businesses see themselves as being highly motivated, those in larger companies tend to view themselves as poorly motivated.
