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Abstract

One of the important social issues attracting the attention of social thinkers in post WWII era has been the issue of intergenerational conflict. Presented by scholars such as Karl Manheim and Margaret Mead, it was thought that in post WWII era intergenerational conflicts or gap rose to a degree that it made the communication and understanding between pre and post WWII generations very difficult. It was theorized that this unbridgeable gap between the two generations was due to grave and rapid social changes that occurred in that era, so that these two generations experienced and lived in two totally different worlds. Although this thesis was criticized in the west with later studies, the issue of generation gap continues to be one of the cross culturally studied subjects. It is claimed that in the developing countries, such as Iran, which experience rapid social change in their transformation from traditional to modern societies, a high level of generation gap has emerged. Focusing on the studies carried out in Iran by the author and others, this paper proposes that in order to acquire deeper understanding of the phenomenon, and the way to encounter it, generation gap should be analyzed into value-oriented and norm-oriented types. The findings in this research revealed that both value-oriented and norm-oriented generation gaps in Iran were considerably wide.

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