Tag «sociology»

In Russia, self-estimates of time spent doing housework stand at five hours a day for women and slightly more than three hours a day for men.Men's involvement in household chores is relatively low, but Russian society finds this fair, according to Svetlana Biryukova, Alla Makarentseva and Ekaterina Tretyakova's study 'Perceptions of Time Spent on Housework among Men and Women'.

HSE researchers examined the structure of online communities of Russian AIDS denialists – people who deny the reality of HIV and AIDS – and the manner in which they spread their ideas. The findings are published in American Behavioral Scientist.

Altruism based on individual values is changing Western society. People in Western countries have seen a rise in individualism for quite some time, and this in turn helps to create generations of people with altruistic mindsets. Christian Welzel, Chief Research Fellow in the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (HSE and Leuphana University of Lüneburg), teamed up with researchers from the University of Lausanne to conduct a study showing the connection between emancipative values and prosocial behaviour. The results of the study were published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.

Adolescents who have a greater tendency to lie to their parents are also more likely to start using alcohol at an earlier age, while excessive parental supervision may aggravate rather than solve the problem. Both honesty and a lower risk of developing a drinking habit are usually the result of a trusting relationship between a teenager and parents, according to a joint study by New York University and HSE researchers, published at Journal of Adolescence.

Happiness and harmony are the two mantras of most commercials. "Buy this stuff, and it'll make you happier," they promise. Yet they do not always succeed in increasing sales. One of the reasons may be that advertisers and their audiences have different views on happiness. While the former tend to reduce happiness to hedonism, pleasure-seeking and satisfying one’s desires here and now, the latter often refuse to limit happiness to simple enjoyment. 

Since World War II, people in many countries have enjoyed a better sense of wellbeing, which has resulted in survival values giving way to emancipation values. Threats no longer lurk at every turn, and each new generation sees more opportunities and fewer barriers to empowerment. The book Freedom Rising by LCCR Chief Research Fellow Christian Welzel offers some ideas on how widespread this process is, whether it is irreversible and where human emancipation can lead.

Residents of provincial Russian towns put it differently when talking about their towns to Muscovites, foreigners, and tourists from other Russian regions. Such an ‘individual approach’ is spontaneous and may be useful in creating city tourist brands, concluded Nadezhda Radina as a result of her experiment, which involved over 800 residents of Russian provinces.

Christian Fröhlich is Assistant Professor at the School of Sociology who has been at HSE since 2014. He also supervises an English-taught Master’s Programme ‘Comparative Social Research’. Christian Fröhlich has talked to HSE University bulletin, The HSE Look, about programme design, partnerships, and lessons learned from running the programme.