A sociological study on young people’s value differences from their parents along the materialist/postmaterialist axis

This study aims to discover the challenges for secular middle-class youth in Turkey with materialist-postmaterialist value differences with their parents climbing the social ladder. The fact that the focused group is comparatively more advantageous than the lower-income groups in terms of socioeconomics can make their problems invisible. In this respect, the subject of this study has not been adequately covered in the literature, and it is crucial to study. The study used the in-depth interview method, and eight young people between the ages of 20 and 30 were reached with snowball sampling. Since the materialist-postmaterialist value difference is based on socioeconomic improvement in Ronald Inglehart’s theory of value change, in this study, attention was paid to the fact that the parents of the young people were born in poor families and climb the social ladder through university or vocational education in order to better capture the value difference in this sense and to see its effect. Thus, it is predicted that parents who grow up in a poor family will have materialist values, while their children who grow up in a more wealthy family will have postmaterialist values. The data obtained at the end of the interviews showed that the subjective well-being of young people who have value differences from their parents is damaged, and they become more vulnerable psychologically. In addition, it has been observed that the state administration in Turkey directly offering a set of values and a lifestyle to the youth negatively affects their happiness and sense of belonging.