A Qualitative Study: An Inquiry into Young Adults’ Decision Making in Collectivistic Culture

Decision-making involves making a choice from amongst various alternatives. Decisions that have several alternatives reveal more difficulties for individuals and this situation causes stress. Young people in a collectivistic culture take longer to achieve economic and psychological autonomy and early adulthood experiences vary greatly by gender, race, ethnicity and social class. Learning to make decisions, experiencing related positive and negative consequences, and learning from these outcomes is an important developmental task. In the present study which is titled, ‘An Inquiry into Decision Making of young adults’, an attempt is made to understand young adult college students’ decision-making abilities, the difficulties faced by them, the factors that they consider as important while taking decisions and the role played by their families in decision-making. Due to the exploratory nature of the study, the investigator has opted not to propose any explicit hypotheses. The study is qualitative in nature. Cross sectional single group design has been used. 20 students- 10 males and 10 female between the ages 17 and 20 were included in the study. The method of purposive sampling was used. The study was carried out in two phases – Pilot phase and Main Phase. A semi-structured interview schedule was developed by the researcher in both phases. Based on the objectives of the study, questions were formulated by the researcher. The participants were interviewed, audio-taped and transcribed. The interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis. Initial codes were generated from these transcripts. Broader themes were identified from these codes. After the initial identification of the themes, the themes were refined by the researcher. The emergent themes in the study indicate that both males and females consider themselves capable of taking decisions on their own. But these young adults feel difficulty in taking autonomous decisions due to conflict between need for autonomy and the need for affiliation. They resolve this conflict by affiliating to their family members and seek their support in decision making. This study provides a scope for developing intervention and theoretical model based on decision making in young adults in collectivistic culture.