For Young People, Winter Olympics 2014 Became a Family Event
Young Russians took the Sochi Olympics as a family holiday rather than a state one. Their parents’ nostalgic memories about the 1980 Olympic Games played their role, which were a personal and at the same time a national event for many Russians. Sochi 2014’s promotion as a national holiday worked worse, though. For young people, the excitement in official media was drowned by criticism of the Olympics on the internet, Anna Sanina, Associate Professor at the HSE St. Petersburg Department of State and Municipal Administration, and research assistants Anastasia Kozlova and Olesya Trigolos, found out.
Sociology and History: a Common Interest
The International Summer School ‘Intellectual History vis-a-vis the Sociology of Knowledge: Between Models and Cases,’ organized by HSE’s Poletayev Institute for Historical and Theoretical Studies in the Humanities, has come to an end. Researchers from Russia, England, France, Hungary, the U.S., and Germany discussed general mechanisms concerning the development of socio-humanitarian knowledge, its processes and its decay over the last several centuries.
The Ideal Woman Differs from the Ideal Wife
Fewer Russians associate relationships between men and women with marriage, and gender roles are moving away from those of husband and wife. Russians still perceive 'the ideal man' and 'the ideal husband' as similar types – the common denominator being the roles of breadwinner and protector. In contrast, ‘the ideal woman' and 'the ideal wife' are two entirely different types. The former must be good-looking above all, while the latter is expected to be loyal, loving, and a good homemaker, according to Yulia Lezhnina, Associate Professor at the HSE's Subdepartment of Socio-Economic Systems and Social Policy.
Summer School Teaches How to Work with Latent Data
The fourth HSE LCSR summer school on Categorical Data Analysis is over. This year 40 young academics from universities and research centres in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Italy, Germany, Poland, Romania, Israel and the USA took part.
Homeopathy Still a Stepdaughter of Medicine
According to homeopaths, an increasing number of Russian patients trust their methods. Meanwhile, conventional medicine does not take homeopathy seriously, viewing it as 'supplementary therapy' at best and as quackery and an occult practice at worst, according to Radik Sadykov, Lecturer at the Faculty of Sociology of the HSE's Department of General Sociology.
Categorical Data Analysis
From 29 June to 12 July the HSE Laboratory of Comparative Social Research is holding the Fourth International Summer School on Categorical Data Analysis in Zelenogorsk in the suburbs of St Petersburg. This year academics have come both from the Russian regions and from abroad — CIS, Germany, Israel, Romania and the USA.
Happiness as an economic category
Renowned American sociologist and political scientist, Professor at the University of Michigan and head of the HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research in St. Petersburg, Ronald Inglehart told the HSE news service about his research – the study of happiness.
Financial Crisis Affects Gender Attitudes
The economic crisis in European countries did not pass by unnoticed as concerns the public’s set of values. In some groups, there was a shift from emancipative values to more traditional ones. Above all, this involves the socially vulnerable strata that the crisis hit hardest of all, Natalia Soboleva, a researcher with HSE’s Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSS), concluded in a study.
Doctors Consider Informal Payments Normal
Many patients are dissatisfied with the health services they receive, but prepared to pay doctors extra for quality care. Doctors, in turn, consider it normal to receive cash or gifts from grateful patients. However, the line can be very thin between gratitude and extortion, according to a study by Alla Chirikova, Senior Research Fellow of the RAS Institute of Sociology, and Sergei Shishkin, Academic Supervisor of the HSE's Institute for Health Economics, published in the Universe of Russia journal.
In a Dialogue with the International Academic Community
HSE Associate Professor Sarah Busse Spencer held a research seminar for lecturers at HSE’s Perm campus.
Submission deadline: June 29, 2026