Article
Статусные неравенства в здоровье: значение социального положения родительской семьи
In accordance with the decrease in a social status, health declines dramatically — firm social inequalities are formed in a society. The article is devoted to a crucial issue in modern studies of inequalities in health. We check the hypothesis according to which a human-being’s health state depends on their parents’ status. Moreover, their own achieved position in a society can impact a health state as well. Different combitnations of individual and parents’ statuses, demonstrating upward or downward mobility or stability, can influence our health in different ways. It also contributes to strengthening or overcoming the inequalities. The analysis of status interactions in their influence on the health of the participants of European Social Study (ESS 2012, 29 countries, representative national survey) was conducted by statistic methods of two-level linear modeling. The results demonstrate that parents’ high level of education as well as respondent’s one leads to a higher estimation of their own health. The increase in educational status leads to a better health condition of people coming from various social stratums. However, this dependence can be observed better in those cases where people are brought up in secured families. In some degree parents’ high social status can resist negative effects of downward mobility on health
The results of empirical study of correlation of socio-cultural and personal characteristics with the attitudes to their own health among Russian (n - 103) and Chinese (n = 182) students are presented. There were cross-cultural differences: Chinese students have higher indices of social capital and long-term orientation while Russian students show autonomous motivation of behavior with respect to their health. Women's attitudes to their health in both samples were more positive then men's ones. Such indices of social capital as the level and radius of trust, significance of ethnic and civic identity are mated with positive attitudes towards health in both samples. Autonomous motivation of behavior is correlated with positive attitudes to health in Russian sample.
In this exploratory study, we examined several interethnic ideologies held by individuals (assimilation, colorblindness, multiculturalism, and polyculturalism) from a social ecological perspective. We examined moderation effects of neighborhood ethnic density (ED) on relationships between interethnic ideologies and intergroup bias towards various minority ethnic groups in the Russian context. Intergroup bias was assessed as a composite score of bias toward four ethnic groups who have different cultural distances from the Russian mainstream population: Chechens, Belarusians, Uzbeks, and Chinese. We obtained a gender balanced sample of ethnic Russians from the Central Federal District of Russia (N = 359) comprising of 47% women and 53% men. The measures were used in a Russian translation by an adaptation using the back-translation and cognitive interviews. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the relationships. The results showed that high perceived neighborhood non-Russian ED weakened negative relations between intergroup bias and ideologies that purportedly accept cultural diversity (multiculturalism and polyculturalism). On the other hand, for interethnic ideologies those purportedly reject cultural diversity, high perceived neighborhood non-Russian ED weakened the positive relations between intergroup bias and assimilation and strengthened the negative relations between intergroup bias and colorblindness. The pattern of results suggests that the relationship between attitudes and intergroup bias may change based on the perceived ethnic composition of the local area and frequency of contacts. Although our findings are relatively novel they support the emerging view that attitudes and intergroup relations need to be studied from a social ecological context.
The newsbreak for writing this article was a kind of jubilee: 25 years ago, in 1992, a conference in Rio de Janeiro adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This event became the first in a series of follow-up conferences and documents aimed primarily at limiting carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere to counter global warming. The author is an active advocate of the concept of the anthropogenic impact on climate as a leading factor in climate change. He stresses the positive potential of international agreements in this field and a new energy-environmental paradigm, which implies the development of low-carbon industry and transition to renewable energy sources and the “green” economy.