Working paper
Representation of Family Policy in Russian Printed Media with Different Political Orientation: Pro-Natalist Turn of 2006
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.
This chapter addresses the relationship between class, family and social welfare policies by analysing the construction of the identity category of ‘unfortunate families’ in popular scientific discourses, governmental policy documents and discourses of social services, and by examining how those labelled as ‘unfortunate’ negotiate this identity conferred to them. The chapter shows that gender and class are closely intertwined in the production of this identity, as it is single mothers who are primarily categorized as ‘unfortunate’. In our analysis we draw on multiple sources of data. First, we analyse in-depth and focus group interviews with service providers and clients and participant observation data from a number of Russian cities. Second, we analyse various government documents and social advertisements, mass media materials, social policy and social work textbooks, and popular scientific texts published during the 1990s-2000s.
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.
The distractive effects on attentional task performance in different paradigms are analyzed in this paper. I demonstrate how distractors may negatively affect (interference effect), positively (redundancy effect) or neutrally (null effect). Distractor effects described in literature are classified in accordance with their hypothetical source. The general rule of the theory is also introduced. It contains the formal prediction of the particular distractor effect, based on entropy and redundancy measures from the mathematical theory of communication (Shannon, 1948). Single- vs dual-process frameworks are considered for hypothetical mechanisms which underpin the distractor effects. Distractor profiles (DPs) are also introduced for the formalization and simple visualization of experimental data concerning the distractor effects. Typical shapes of DPs and their interpretations are discussed with examples from three frequently cited experiments. Finally, the paper introduces hierarchical hypothesis that states the level-fashion modulating interrelations between distractor effects of different classes.
This article describes the expierence of studying factors influencing the social well-being of educational migrants as mesured by means of a psychological well-being scale (A. Perrudet-Badoux, G.A. Mendelsohn, J.Chiche, 1988) previously adapted for Russian by M.V. Sokolova. A statistical analysis of the scale's reliability is performed. Trends in dynamics of subjective well-being are indentified on the basis the correlations analysis between the condbtbions of adaptation and its success rate, and potential mechanisms for developing subjective well-being among student migrants living in student hostels are described. Particular attention is paid to commuting as a factor of adaptation.