Features of the Content of Virtual and Real Identity of High School Students

The article presents the results of a study of virtual and real identity in boys and girls. Currently, communication on the Internet is widespread. This is due to the relevance of in-depth study of the identities formed on the web among the younger generation. Despite the presence in Russian practice of research on virtual identity among both young people and adults, the issue of the peculiarities of virtual and real identities in older schoolchildren is not sufficiently disclosed. The purpose of the study is to study the peculiarities in the self-image in the real world and the Internet space of senior students. The study involved 56 students of the Lyceum of the city of Kazan aged 15 to 17 years. The main research method was content analysis. When studying identities, we chose the open-type methodology “Who am I?” (M. Kuhn, T. McPartland; modified by V. V. Lazurina) and “Who am I online?”. The results showed that “family identity” turned out to be the predominant category of self-determination in real life: respondents most often described themselves from the perspective of family relationships and roles. The most “popular” category in the answers to the question “Who am I online?” turned out to be communicative. The severity of educational, family and communicative components as a result of self-identity has statistical differences between the real space of students and the virtual one. The answers of boys and girls on academic and family identity were significantly more often given relative to the real world. Conversely, communicative identity is statistically significantly more often mentioned in a virtual environment.