The Concept of "Young Couple" in Psychological Research

The article analyses the phenomenon of young married couple in the context of modern transformations of the family institution. Particular attention is paid to the distinction between the concepts of ‘family’ and ‘spouses’ from the standpoint of socio-psychological analysis. To this end, the author theoretically examines the approaches to explaining these terms available in the scientific psychological and legal literature. Law is one of the types of social norms that regulate the most important issues for people. Given that the registration of marriage or childbirth is regulated by law, its study in this context is also appropriate and necessary. The analysis allowed us to conclude that there are the following practices of using the words ‘family’ and ‘spouses’: 1. They can be used interchangeably if the family is referred to in the sense of the husband-wife subsystem. To concretise such a case, there is a special term - a married family (a married couple without children for various reasons). 2. To use the term ‘family’ in relation to persons united by kinship (blood or legal), it is necessary that one of them is an adult and the other is a child. It is determined that the criteria for identifying a couple as young are conditional, and most often the age of the partners (up to 30 years), the ‘length of marriage’ (on average - up to 5 years), and the peculiarities of adaptation processes taking place in a couple are used for this purpose. The author emphasises the importance of taking into account not only quantitative criteria that can be measured by the number of years, but also qualitative features that can only be found out by conducting a deeper study of the peculiarities of couple interaction and mutual adaptation of partners. This is important because a marriage, even between people of retirement age, will be considered young in its first years. The article also outlines the key difficulties of this period (domestic, communicative, role, socio-cultural) and its positive aspects (high level of marriage satisfaction, emotional support and partners' desire for personal identification with each other).