Research & Expertise news at HSE University

The Russian family has been becoming more demographically heterogeneous over recent years. Some of the families follow the trend of having many children: women more often give birth to a third and fourth child, and the gap between births is decreasing, which makes the evolution of the family faster. At the same time, younger generations are inclined to postpone marriage and having their first child, which leads either to later motherhood or to childlessness. This means that two opposite trends are developing; along with the growing share of ‘Western-type’ families, with postponed parenthood and fewer children, there is a revival of the traditional family with more children, Sergey Zakharov, Deputy Director of the HSE Institute of Demography, reported.

of representatives of small manufacturing companies who are prepared to take out long-term loans to develop and modernize their operations would agree to do so at rates comparable to the current rates of 18-21%.

Many management students have difficulties predicting their career paths for the next five or ten years. Some of the students obviously have big hoped for their future and are confident about rapid career growth. They believe that by 30 they will be able to become top-level managers in medium and big organizations, and will never repeat the mistakes of their principals and teachers. Svetlana Satikova, Associate Professor at the Department of Management of HSE in St. Petersburg, studied the career expectations of future managers.

of Russians agree that too much importance today is attached to the achievements of science and technology, which is to the detriment of the spiritual side of life.

From November 14 - 24th a series of lectures on 'Diversity and Uniformity in Linguistic Sound Systems' by Ian Maddieson, Adjunct Research Professor at the University of New Mexico, Adjunct Professor Emeritus at the University of California was held at the HSE School of Linguistics. The course was dedicated to the phonetic diversity of languages and included eight lectures. During the series, Professor Maddieson talked to HSE English News Editor, Anna Chernyakhovskaya’s questions about his research into the relations between language and environment.

The 5th annual LCSR conference was organized  from 15th - 21st November at HSE. One of the keynote speakers at the conference on Cultural and Economic Changes under Cross-national Perspective is the Director of the Social and Economic Survey Research Institute at Qatar University, Darwish Al Emadi. Dr. Al Emadi’s talk was on The Challenges of Surveying in Countries with Unorthodox Population Pyramids. He spoke to HSE English News about his long term goal to improve education on a global level and about his cooperation with HSE.

On November 13-14 a meeting of the Executive Committee and the Scientific Advisory Committee of the World Values Survey Association was held at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. The main mission of the meeting was the design of the master questionnaire for the new wave of the World Values Survey to be launched in 2017. World Values Survey scholars are also participating in the LCSR 5th International Annual Research Conference 'Cultural and Economic changes under cross-national perspective' which is currently underway at HSE. Christian Haerpfer, President of the World Values Association, has talked to HSE News Service about the survey and the preparation for its new wave.

A conference at HSE on 11th & 12th November discussed the issue of relations between the state and non-profit organisations. In the column ‘An Academic’s View’ HSE Vice-RectorLev Jakobson considers how to approach this problem as subject matter for academic discussion.