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2019. N 11
Problems of Russian Family
Theories and Practices of Family Policy in the XX and XXI Centuries
In the 2010-th mass resentment towards such liberal conceptions as feminism, greeting of large-scale immigration, equal value of traditional and same-sex marriages contributes to the surge of right populism in the West and neo-traditionalism in Russia. In the domains of family and sexuality, Russian neo-traditionalism manifests itself in hostility to some patterns, interpreted as Trojan horse of the West, rather than in real behaviour. State paternalism is typical of family policy in many Western countries. While, due to specificity of civilization matrix, state paternalism is inevitable in Russia, it should be kept within reasonable boundaries. Progress in interaction between a state and non-profit NGOs remains to be topical for today’s Russia.
The Key Agents of Care for Older People in Modern Russia
The aging population, the nuclearization of families, and, as a result, the growing number of single elderly people have stimulated the development of social policy and the emergence of new agents of older people care in modern Russia. In addition to the traditional agent — the family, state social services and NGOs/ business organizations have appeared. To analyze their activities, we used materials from our studies of 2011-2014 and 2017-2018 (interviews with older people, representatives of state social services, official documents of various levels) and publications of other researchers. Intra-family care for an old person is often a necessary measure, albeit a “culturally approved one”. A new form of “quasi-family” care is an actively developing institution of “foster families” for the elderly. Another major agent of care is state social services. The main difficulties in their work with the elderly, according to our data, are associated with a rather bureaucratic, limited and inflexible format of service provision. Such a format is able to satisfy some part of the basic needs of an elderly person, but practically does not allow the most elderly person to be an agent in organizing self-care. In this case, too much emotional and physical stress falls on social workers. An alternative to public services are NPOs/business organizations offering a wider and more flexible range of services. However, here we encounter several problems at once: the problem of access (as a rule, they only work in large cities with a population of over one million); too high cost of services. In the case when a business organization or NPO is included in the register of social service providers and can offer their services at prices comparable to government services, there is a problem of poor awareness/mistrust/alertness on the part of older people who reproduce the logic “state” means “reliable”.
Russian Elite Families: Methods of Study and Practices of Functioning
The paper analyzes the phenomenon of “elite family”. The first postulate is the question of what are the features of studying the elite as a social community and what are the possibilities for applying qualitative research methods. The key attention is being drawn to the fact that the biographical method has a serious potential in studying the elite and powerful practices, empirical possibilities of applying the method of structured biography and traditional biographical interview are considered. On the basis of primary and secondary empirical data (analysis of interview materials), the problem of the role that family resources play in the reproduction of elite positions (using the example of elite families) is resolved. These cases allow us to reveal the corpus of ideas of the political and economic elite about the role and functions of the family, educational and cultural capital: who is the main carrier of capital, the ways and forms of its transfer and inheritance. A separate focus in the work is devoted to consideration of the interaction between sport and family as social institutions.
Youth without Work: Family Support as a (De)Stabilizing Factor
Modern studies have found that the average age of achievement of professional and family status, traditionally related to the stage of adult life (stable work, career, family, marriage and children), is increasing. Increasingly, researchers problematising this process of growing up, highlighting a special group of young people who do not study and do not work (NEET-young people, no-no, hikikomori). they talk about the immaturity, lack of independence of the modern young generation (sometimes hanging the label of “lost generation”), not the desire to grow up and take responsibility. This model of behavior is typical not only for Russia, but also for developed countries. The article highlights the problem of interaction of young people from 20 to 30 years, who are outside the sphere of employment and study, with the parent family. Based on in-depth interviews with young people conducted in 2018, the author analyzes the relationship of unemployed or unstable young people with the social status of the family. Interviews with young unemployed people serve as a basis for identifying the factors of family influence on the formation of the strategy of children’s behavior in the labor sphere.
Attitude to Inter-Ethnic Marriages as a Symptom of the Formation of Russian Identity
With a high proportion of inter-ethnic marriages support (70-77%), they are explicitly perceived as a phenomenon that lies outside the field of inter-ethnic processes in Russia and relates only to the interpersonal sphere. However, the figure of 70-77% is key in the description of the various interethnic behavior aspects for the Russian youth. Exactly this number of Russian students who say that they have national feelings, but exactly same number are ready and want to live in a multinational environment. They easily feel themselves among the representatives of other peoples of Russia and are confident that the peoples friendship in Russia is reviving. Thus, the figures referring to seemingly private family relations are not arbitrary, but they somehow relate to other inter-ethnic relations, as a whole. The young people attitude towards inter-ethnic nuptiality reflects an implicitly wider complex of ideas and feelings of contemporary Russian youth. This can be considered as one of the new Russian identity symptoms formation.
Forms of Marriage in Contemporary Russia: Comparison of Socio-Demographic Characteristics
Within the framework of the evolutionary approach, changes in family relations, including in Russia, are being considered. The diversity of forms of marriage in this context becomes an element of the modern family system and is the result of the transformational processes of the institutions of family and marriage.. Possible variants of marriage are described using the term “partnership”, differentiated by the criteria of availability of previous relationships, registration, localization of partners, their gender. Based on the data of the Russian Monitoring of the Economic Situation and Health of the Population of the Higher School of Economics (RLMS-HSE), the most common types of marriages are distinguished: cohabitation (first/repeated), marriage (first/remarriage), socio-demographic indicators of representatives of these family groups are compared. For comparison, besides the basic indicators (age, education level, income, employment, professional status), additional (number of children, duration of residence) are used. Discriminant analysis reveals the factors that determine the individual's belonging to a particular family group.
“Childfree”: Rational Choice or Behavioral Myopia?
The article discusses the economic basis of the conscious refusal of the birth and upbringing of children. Both classical and more modern views are analyzed. The authors show that motives to reduce fertility tend to increase. Children are more likely to be considered as a kind of tax for the public good, which is worth avoiding. This is evidenced by a very generous subsidization of children in the welfare states. At the same time, self-satisfaction from children continues to be a sufficiently strong motive that inhibits the growth in the number of childfree. In Russia, the childfree movement has received a certain development. However, there are few convinced adherents of this behavior: for men, it slightly exceeds 2%, for women it exceeds 4%. The marginality of the phenomenon does not mean its general public disapproval: a rather large percentage treat it with understanding. Childfree prevails in megacities, which confirms the economists ’conclusion about the negative dependence of the birth rate on the amount of lost income and career opportunities. The propensity for childfree is also determined in proportion to the number of years of residence in the megacities. In them, the majority of the population believes that a person can be happy without children.
Reproductive Motivation in Middle-Income Large Families: The Results of a Narrative Interview
The purpose of the article is to present the results of a sociological study of large families with average incomes for reproductive motivation, the birth of subsequent (after the first) children. Research Methodology in this paper, the authors relied on the phenomenological and anthropological approaches, theories of familistic and sociology of the family. The main method of obtaining data was the method of narrative interviews with spouses from large families with middle and/or high incomes. Based on the results of a narrative interview conducted in the autumn of 2018 among large families of the Ural region, the authors reveal the features of reproductive motivation in large families with middle-income. The article describes attitudes toward motherhood and the birth of children of mothers and fathers of many children, including the timing of births, as well as the birth of children of different sexes. An analysis of narrative interviews allowed us to draw conclusions about the change in attitudes toward the birth of children and the motivation of births during the life of mothers, the impact of having children on changes in their daily lives — their financial situation, their relationship with their spouse, and their way of life. The authors investigate the influence on the motivation of fertility in mothers with many children such factors as features of parental families, attitudes towards religion, marital status, personal life goals, etc.
Children, Family and Society
Participation in Decision Making among Children, Living in Institutional Care
Children's participation in decision making is widely declared as the right of the child, with positive consequences for society and for the child. Against this background, the experience of children's participation in decision making is surprisingly rarely studied. In order to fill this gap we describe participation in decision making among children, living in institutional care in three Russian regions and aged 10-17 years (n = 517). Limited participation in decision making is significantly correlated with both institutional and personal factors of children. Our findings show the importance of taking into account the perspectives of the child within the processes of the system of social protection of children.
Autobiographical Narrative on Orphanhood: Key Categories and Structures
The analysis of interviews with young people who have orphan experience reveals a special type of narrative strategy of presenting their lives — biography as overcoming. The orphanhood is represented through implicit narrative categories. The main is “lack of agency”, which appears as the inability to make independent decisions, lack of understanding, lack or incompleteness of ownership rights and disposition of personal property, etc. Also, the narratives show the category of “homelessness” as well as an extremely complex category of “kinship”. Overcoming can be understood as the acquisition of agency through vocational education, getting your own home, “reconciliation” (often imaginary) with blood parents. Due to the age and social situation of the respondents, the beginning of professional activity partly determines the choice of the identified narrative strategy.
Biography and society
“All My Life Revolves around Buddhism. Buddhism, Work, Children, Family...”: a Biographical Project of a Modern Buddhist
The article represents the analysis of a biographical interview with a member of St. Petersburg Buddhist community, which is considered as an ideally typical case. The study focuses on the life trajectory of the modern Buddhist and the role of religious conversion in his biographical project. As a methodological toolkit of the biographical research, the conception of F. Schutze’s narrative interview is used. This approach, on the one hand, pays enough attention to the structural limitations set by the social context; on the other hand, it allows to identify intentional processes in the biography and to correlate these restraints and subjective goal-setting with the interpretations of the informant. Based on the analysis of the interview, it can be argued that, for our hero, as a typical representative of a generation born in the 1960s, religious conversion becomes the way of adaptation to the new post-Soviet socio-economic and ideological reality. The symbolic, psychological and social resources of the religious community are used to overcome social exclusion and deprivation, to reach spiritual well-being and are conceptualized as the means of increasing opportunities.
Scientific Life
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