Diversification of the Student Lives and Self-Positioning of Japanese University Students

The aim of this research is to clarify how Japanese university students spend their university lives and how they position their own lives.

Japanese university students have diverse experiences during the transition period between April matriculation and the simultaneous recruiting of new graduates, which is a unique system. Previous research on the diversification of university students in Japan has focused on the diversification of attributes, but it is difficult to say that it fully captures the diversity of university students. Two specific issues can be pointed out. The first is that the specific and concrete perspective of focusing on the lives of individual students is being overlooked. The phenomenon of “diversifying of students” is familiar to higher education researchers, starting from Trow Martin. However, there is no narrative from the students themselves, and the day-to-day activities of what each individual thinks and feels and how they live their student lives are being ignored. The diversity that has not been captured until now would be revealed in the narratives of these specific experiences. The second is that the research does not consider where the students position themselves, or how they give meaning to their lives. In research on sociology of education, it is said that the image of university students is found based on their attributes and lifestyles, but it would be largely influenced by how the students position themselves. The subjective criteria by which actual university students evaluate their own and others' student lives has not been within the scope of previous research.

For this reason, this study will conduct semi-structured interviews with current Japanese university students. It will then use the rich narratives of university students to get to the bottom of the reality of “diversification”.