Life course as an identity component of the last Soviet generation in Lithuania

ENThis chapter addresses the ways in which certain social and demographic processes describe the last Lithuanian Soviet generation (born in the late 1960s and 1970s). The primary focus is directed to the analysis of the demographic changes that took place in the life course of this generation during the period of transition to adulthood. It is essential to identify how this period of life was structured after the collapse of the Soviet system and under changing social, economic and ideological conditions, as well as with the development of a new political, social and economic order in the 1990s. The following events of the transitional phase are analysed here: leaving the parental home; completing education, starting work for the first time; first partnerships; and giving birth to the first child. The aim is to reveal the ways in which these specifically changing experiences during the transition to adulthood reflect distinctive formation features of the last Soviet generation and how these experiences delimit this generation from both previous and subsequent generations. The chapter also surveys the ways these experiences reflect transformational processes of the life course in terms of standardisation/de-standardisation and institutionalisation/de-institutionalisation, which took place in the 1990s. The chapter draws on the secondary analysis of demographic data. This chapter draws on the demographic data from the Generations and Gender Survey (Kart ir lyči tyrimas) conducted in 2006–2009 in Lithuania, the data on the period between 1990 and 2011 gained from the Department of Statistics of Lithuania (Statistics Lithuania) and the materials of the survey conducted under the project The Last Soviet Generation in the Changing Contexts of Modernity (Paskutinioji sovietmečio karta kintančios modernybės kontekstuose). [Publisher annotation]