Article
В демографической истории такого еще не было
In an analysis of research data on three generations of Russians, it was found that the impetus prompted by the social and economic transformation in the early 1990s that opened up opportunities for social and professional growth had been practically exhausted by late 2006, and the tendency toward downward social mobility has become more pronounced. This provides evidence that the social structure of today's Russia is "stagnant" and there are no positive shifts in its dynamics.
Over the last centuries, marriage and the family have undergone dramatic transformations, both in industrialized and less developed countries. Within recent decades, new patterns have emerged, such as blended families or same-sex couples, while divorce rates have increased. During this period, fertility has gone down while voluntary childlessness became more frequent modifying the distribution of family types among economic and social groups. This transformation has been accompanied by deep value changes and modifications of women’s social status and roles in society. Demographers as well as other social scientists like sociologists and economists are involved in research projects aiming at both providing new insights on the mechanisms that drive these transformations and better understanding social and economic consequences of these changes. In a complementary way, philosophers and lawyers explore the normative assessment of the ethical questions that are raised. Philosphers construct ethical recommendations for population and family policies and tackle the question of optimal population size. Lawyers enforce legal rules about fertility and the family.
The Center for Research in Demography and Societies at Université catholique de Louvain invites researchers from all these disciplines and beyond to the 40th edition of the Quetelet Seminar. The main objective of this seminar aims at presenting the most advanced works on "Fertility, childlessness and the family". The spirit of the seminar will be interdisciplinary ; each session will include presentations of demographers and of other social scientists.
The second afternoon of the seminar (November 06th) will be dedicated to the lauching of an intersciplinary book about "Distance and family, marital and sexual ties : an interdisciplinary approach" that has been coordinated by the CIRFASE. For this lauching, four international experts from demography, sociology and psychology, will discuss the main ideas of the book in the light of their own researchs in this field.
In the article authors use the vital birh and death registration data on 10 regions exctracted from the Rosstat database to evaluate an input of international migrant into Russian fertility and mortality levels.
The article at issue is intended to look into family-related concepts through experimental psycholinguistic tools. Furthermore, it involves substantial references to linguistics, history, sociology, and psychology to reveal the background of the experimental data retrieved. Such approach allows researching and accounting for the experimental data from different angles what makes the interpretation more comprehensive, thorough and credible.
Apart from the public sphere and the norms set by society, the private sphere plays an important role in the lives of the disabled, including the personal experience of disability at a micro level: in their families, everyday routines and romantic relationships. In this chapter, issues of family structure are considered using a narrative analysis of interviews with women who use wheelchairs. Various cultural, social, economic and political determinants effect the formation of certain types of family structure and attitudes towards family life. At the same time, they interrelate with biographical factors that reinforce or weaken the limits of freedom and private life. Using narrative analysis, I demonstrate what role family plays in constructing the identity of a person with a disability, and how family members act as coauthors of individual biographies. This can be seen in those dilemmas of family life associated with the feelings, sexuality and emotional stability at the micro-level of the life experience and identification of women with disabilities.
In this chapter we aim to examine the discourses created and reproduced through the interaction between single mothers and representatives of social services. The analysis is based on twenty-six interviews with single mothers and six interviews with social workers conducted in 2001–2003, and six interviews with single mothers and three with social workers conducted in 2006 in the Saratov region in Russia, as well as official documents and the publications of other researchers. In our interviews with mothers, we focused on the issues of familial well-being and interactions with social services, while social workers were asked to discuss their experiences with clients. A short overview of statistics and social policy terminology prefaces a discussion of how mother-headed families and state social policy interrelate and affect each other. The subsequent sections contain analysis of the interviews with single mothers who, as the heads of low-income households, interact with the social service system. The analysis demonstrates that single mothers are frustrated by inadequate assistance and the impossibility of improving their life situations. The discussion goes on to show that social workers, who are used to interpreting complex issues in the life situations of single mothers as individual psychological peculiarities, tend to blame the victim, thus ignoring important social conditions and imposing on women a responsibility for problems that are societal in origin.
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.