By choosing education for their children, parents tend to perpetuate social inequalities. While educated middle-class parents invest in their children's future by selecting the best possible school and becoming actively involved in the educational process, working-class families often feel they cannot afford to choose and instead, send children to the nearest school, expecting them to make it on their own, according to Larisa Shpakovskaya, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, HSE Campus in St. Petersburg.
Overall, Russians tend to be satisfied with their country's health care system, particularly when they do not need to deal with it; however, those with recent first-hand experience of healthcare often complain about the lack of professionalism and the decline in free medical services, according to Sergey Shishkin, Head of HSE's Department of Health Care Administration and Economy, and Natalia Kochkinaand Marina Krasilnikova, sociologists with the Levada Centre, in their paper Health Care Service Availability and Quality as Assessed by the Russian Public.
In 2015, the world celebrates the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, an event that is a particularly important part of Russian and German history. Scholars from the two countries were the authors of the latest edition of the Journal of Social Policy Studies.
Decisions relating to student dropout often resemble a trial with students as defendants and teachers as prosecutors and judges. This approach can create barriers between students and staff and raise the issue of the university's mission, according to Ivan Gruzdev, Evgeny Terentiev and Elena Gorbunova of the HSE’s Internal Monitoring Center.
Seongsoo Choi, PhD in sociology and Junior Fellow at the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course (CIQLE), Yale University, will begin teaching in his new role as Assistant Professor of Sociology at the HSE St. Petersburg campus in September. He spoke to the HSE English News service about his research in social inequality, about the work he will be doing at HSE St Petersburg and about being a part of the international academic community.
Higher education cuts the risk of poverty by more than half, according to Alina Pishnyak and Daria Popova , leading researchers at the HSE Centre for Studies of Income and Living Standards. Their findings reveal that the household incomes of families where all adults are university-educated stand at 20% above the average, and conversely, in families where none of the adults hold a degree, living standards tend to be below average by a quarter.
Age boundaries are diminishing fast and do not influence people’s lives as much as before. Nevertheless, age remains an important factor in social interaction. Age self-identification for women is closely related to their appearances, which is why beauty remains one of the main self-investment projects for women. These are the conclusions drawn by researchers from the HSE Centre for Youth Studies (CYS) in St. Petersburg as part of a project entitled ‘Age under Construction: Age Construction by Girls and Young Women’.
Free legal services are generally available in Russia, but their quality varies widely. Court-appointed lawyers tend to be less knowledgeable and competent than those who offer their services pro bono for reasons such as social responsibility or professional reputation, according to a study by Anton Kazun, Junior Research Fellow at the HSE International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development.
Research on game theory has a strong history in Russia, and this year’s opening of the new HSE International Laboratory for Game Theory and Decision-Making in St. Petersburg will only help it grow stronger. Leading the laboratory, which will include researchers from the St. Petersburg Institute for Economics and Mathematics, will be Herve Moulin, Donald J. Robertson Chair of Economics at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. Prof. Moulin is a scholar who is known for his research contributions in mathematical economics, in particular in the fields of mechanism design, social choice, game theory and fair division.
The politicization and commercialization of health issues in today’s Western culture have led to growing healthism – a peremptory idea of self-preserving behaviour. This approach criticizes everything that fails to fit into the glamorous standards of a beautiful, young and slim body. In extreme forms, healthism is close to eugenics, which selects a ‘correct’ heredity. But even simple concerns about the ‘standards’ of physical condition may provoke hypercorrection, such as surgery on a healthy body, said Evgenia Golman, lecturer at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences Department of General Sociology, in her article published in the Journal of Social Policy Studies.
