Article
Relationship of alcohol consumption with social structure of contemporary Russia
The article is devoted to consumption of alcohol in contemporary Russia. It is aimed at revealing a range of social practices of alcohol consumption; at testing how those practices are connected to social classes existing in Russia, and moreover, discovering social layers which demonstrate new styles of alcohol drinking. Social practices are classified according to types of alcoholic beverages consumed during the last 30 days, frequency of drinking, places of alcohol consumption, and association between alcohol drinking and mealtime. The research is built on the 21st wave of Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE), an annual nationwide panel survey designed to monitor health and economic welfare of households and individuals in Russia. All calculations were done on a sample of 8, 778 alcohol drinkers aged 15 and older. Methods used to analyze data embrace correspondence analysis, factor analysis, and k-means cluster analysis. Six practices of alcohol consumption are ascertained. Research findings demonstrate significant relation of social structure and alcohol consumption. Higher classes mostly represent consumers of light and expensive alcohol. Middle classes tend to consume homemade alcohol. Lower classes stick to vodka, traditional and cheap alcohol. Additionally, individuals who tend to excessive drinking are concentrated in lower-low class. © 2015 r.
The monograph is devoted to analysis of social stratification in Russian society. Models of its social structures constructed within the modern approaches to stratification (neo-Weberian, neo-Marxist, resource-based, ect.) are characterized and compared, and the approaches themselves are summarized as well. Empirical base for the analysis is the data of nationwide sociological researches carried out by IS RAS in 1994-2013
This paper is devoted to the rational behavior in the sense of the educational level choice. The theoretical model is based on the discounted flow of personal’s utility function covered the period of the education and future work. Maximizing the flow under the budget constraint we received differential equation included the rate of income grow after the acquisition of education. The solution is the Mincerian type equation. The main result of the model is that the persons with rapid growth of their earnings profile should have the smaller slope coefficients of schooling in the earnings equation. The empirical part of the research is based on the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) data set. The theoretical results have been confirmed by the regression analysis. Splitting the RLMS sample according to the respondents’ wage profiles we received that highly educated agents unlike the unskilled workers have higher income but slighter slope earnings profiles. It means that the workers expected the high growth of their incomes after the schooling are less inclined to receive higher level of education. Otherwise the persons who expected high income on the job start justify their hopes, but come across the low growth of the incomes.
Along with the fast growing economy, the term «BRICs» was coined to represent the newly emerging countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China. The enhanced economy in these countries has largely improved peoples life; at the same time, it has also strongly influenced the transformation of social structure, norms and values. However, as the worlds attention centers on their economic development at the micro level, the social changes at the micro level have often been neglected, and a specific comparative study of these four countries is even more rare. This handbooks contributing authors are leading sociologists in the four countries. They fill the gap in existing literature and examine specifically the changes in each society from the perspective of social stratification, with topics covering the main social classes, the inequality of education and income, and the different styles of consumption as well as the class consciousness and values. Under every topic, it gathers articles from authors of each country. Such a comparative study could not only help us achieve a better understanding of the economic growth and social development in these countries, but also lead us to unveil the mystery of how these emerging powers with dramatic differences in history, geography, culture, language, religion and politics could share a common will and take joint action. In general, the handbook takes a unique perspective to show readers that it is the profound social structural changes in these countries that determine their future, and to a large extent, will shape the socio-economic landscape of the future world.
This article addresses the questions, What do children in urban areas do on Saturdays? What type of organizational resources do they have access to? Does this vary by social class? Using diary data on children’s activities on Saturdays in the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale metropolitan area, the authors describe the different types of venues (households, businesses, public space, associations, charities, congregations, and government/tribal agencies) that served different types of children. They find that the likelihood of using a charity or business rather than a government or tribal provider increased with family income. Also, the likelihood of using a congregation or a government facility rather than business, charity, or household increased with being Hispanic. The authors discuss implications for the urban division of labor on Saturdays and offer research questions that need further investigation.
In this paper the public-private wage gap is estimated by means both of the OLS and the quantile regression, which will provide a more complex picture of the distribution of the public-private sector wage gap. The author finds the existence of significant public-private wage gap (about 30%) considering both observable and unobservable characteristics of workers and jobs. Using the decomposition based on quantile regression helps to answer the question about the nature of the wage differences. The author comes to the conclusion that the main reason for the gap is the institutional mechanisms of public sector wages in Russia. The analysis is based on the data from Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) 2000-2010.
The goal of this chapter is to provide empirical evidence of the effect of differential migration strategies on poverty in Nepal. We model the effect of remittances and work migration on consumption of households with a migrants. Using the cross-sectional sample of the nationally representative Nepal Living Standart Survey of 2004, we estimate a model of household migration decisions jointly with the consumption equations by the method of full information maximum likelihood (FIML) with instrumental variables. The method takes into account unobserved household characteristics that could simultaneously affect household migration decisions and household income. We simulate counterfactual expenditure distributions to determine the effect of work-related migration on the levels of aggregate poverty and inequality in Nepal. While most of the recent papers on the effect of migration on inequality and poverty have controlled for heterogeneity and selection in terms of unobserved characteristics, to the best of our knowledge this is the first study using FIML to estimate the trivariate selection model in this context. The novelty of the study resides on separating different effects of domestic and international migration on household welfare.
The article presents a sociological interpretation of efficient management of research team’s social structure, based on the stationary action principle.A relevant mathematical model was designed, built on application of variational principle to social structure operationalised as probability density of research team’s social distinctions. The article also includes an overview of empirical testing of the model by conducting a sample study.
Aims: This study compared the level of alcohol mortality in tsarist and contemporary Russia. Methods: Cross-sectional and annual time-series data from 1870 to 1894, 2008 and 2009 on the mortality rate from deaths due to ‘drunkenness’ were compared for men in the 50 provinces of tsarist ‘European Russia’: an area that today corresponds with the territory occupied by the Baltic countries, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine and the Russian provinces to the west of the Ural Mountains. Results: In 1870–1894, the male death rate from ‘drunkenness’ in the Russian provinces (15.9 per 100,000) was much higher than in the non-Russian provinces. However, the rate recorded in Russia in the contemporary period was even higher—23.3. Conclusions: Russia has had high levels of alcohol mortality from at least the late 19th century onwards. While a dangerous drinking pattern and spirits consumption may underpin high alcohol mortality across time, the seemingly much higher levels in the contemporary period seem to be also driven by an unprecedented level of consumption, and also possibly, surrogate alcohol use. This study highlights the urgent need to reduce the level of alcohol consumption among the population in order to reduce high levels of alcohol mortality in contemporary Russia.