Article
Вариативность моделей современной городской многодетности: возрождение традиции, новые браки или сетевые эффекты?
Existing studies of multi-child families portray this social group without taking into account its internal heterogeneity. Multi-child families can differ in terms of sibship and in the structure of family relations. Considering basic social demographic indicators describing such families immediately reveals that families with many children are not homogeneous and might be differentiated by the number of features such as the number of children, birth spacing and marital stability. The current study is based on a survey of 502 multi-child families in several regions of Russia. By conducting a hierarchical cluster analysis based on indicators capturing the variation of fertility and marriage patterns, the study reveals diverse types of multi-child families. Furthermore, the authors outline the key reasons for their formation and sustainability. Specifically, the study reveals 5 stable models: the planned, the traditional, the new-religious, the formal and the remarried. These types are further characterized by distinct factors that are known to shape fertility and marriage: education, religiosity and the characteristics of social networks. In the explanation of the models of multi-child families particular attention is paid to the social component of religiosity contributing to marital stability and fertility levels.
This article scrutinizes personality variable of successful coping with stress termed hardiness (inventors of the term are Susan Cobeisa and Salvatore Maddi, the author of the Russian equivalent zhiznestoikost' is D.A. Leontiev). Thе work offers results of the comparative examination of hardiness in students of an Orthodox university and of secular universities.
The paper is a quantitative study of the interaction between religiosity and attitudes towards sexual minorities that can be regarded as a manifestation of social conservatism. The aim of the research is to identify significant differences in attitudes towards homosexuals among believers and nonbelievers, those who attend religious services regularly and those who “believe without belonging”. Country specifics of the interaction are in the focus of analysis, as well as the differences among Orthodox Christians from different European countries. Statistical analysis results suggest that in Western, Northern and Southern Europe differences among religious groups in attitudes towards homosexuals are stable and significant while Russia and Eastern Europe demonstrate only weak differences among confessions and no effect of the degree of religiosity on one’s approval of sexual minorities.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.