Conferences we have participated in 2011
May, 19-21. Evgeny Kochkin's report in Humboldt University
Evgeny Kochkin presented his report "Gender Bias in Educational Expectations of Children from Indian Rural Area" at the conference dedicated to South-Asian studies at Humboldt University. The conference was called “Engendering and Degendering South Asian Studies”.
The report of SESL was called «Gender Bias in Educational Expectations of Children from Indian Rural Area». It is based on the data of Rajgurunagar study which included the survey of 574 pupils of three schools in one of the rural Indian towns. The researchers point out that parents often pay more attention to their sons’ education and career than to their daughters’ (for example, more money is spent on the sons’ education).
The main idea of the report was that it is insufficient to consider gender as a universal variable which can shape children’s educational trajectories in Indian educational system. Other characteristics should be taken into account while the gender effect is examined. The example of a small Indian town shows that girls from different social groups have different educational achievements, expectations and trajectories.
April,1. Inter-university Student Conference at HSE
On the 1st of April, Inter-university student conference was held in the HSE, St Petersburg. The conference was combined of seven sections, one of them was organized and conducted by the Laboratory. Our researchers have also made reports in other sections.
Daniel Alexandrov and Svetlana Savelieva held the section “Sociology of Education”. There were five reports submitted by the HSE students and students from Saint Petersburg State University in this section. Tamara Petrova presented the results of cross-country comparison in the sphere of inequality of educational achievements of pupils. Ksenia Tenisheva reported about the educational choice of 9th -grade schoolchildren. The aim of this study is to reveal the structure of the factors determining the choice of schoolchildren after the 9th grade.
Kate Kuldina presented her report in the section “Demographic Policy in Russia”. She has shown some preliminary results of the analysis of value shifts of Russians, depending on generation. In the section of Internet studies the working group of the Laboratory (Irina Khvan, Alexei Gorgadze and Egine Sukiasyan) presented the results of the first part of the project “Ethnic communities in social networks”.
February,22. “Sociological Methods in Contemporary Research Practice”
On February, 22, 2011 at the department of sociology at HSE (Moscow) the fifth academic and practical conference dedicated to professor Kryshtanovsky was held. It was titled “Sociological Methods in Contemporary Research Practice”. Valeria Ivanushina and Ksenia Tenisheva have delivered their papers at the conference.
Valeria Ivanishina has delivered a lecture on multilevel covariance analysis (also known as P2) in explaining ethnicity effects in schoolchildren networks in the section called “Methodological experiments”. This was the only paper on methodology of data processing in this section. Five other lectures were given on various topics. The scholars are conducting research in sociology, marketing and social psychology, but are focused on methodological design.
Ksenia Tenisheva has participated in the same section headed by Oleg Oberemko. She has presented a paper written in cooperation with Daniel Alexandrov that was titled “Concept of frame and mixed-method design”. This paper explores how to use frames for combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in one research.
February, 8-13. Daniel Alexandrov and Valeria Ivanushina have presented their papers at Sunbelt XXXI Conference.
Daniel Alexandrov and Valeria Ivanushina have just returned from the international conference on network analysis that was called Sunbelt XXXI and was held in St. Petersburg, Florida on February 8-13.
Daniel Alexandrov tells about it:
My lecture and the lecture of Valeria Ivanushina were held at different sections. One was about the impact of ethnicity at the choice of friends in students’ networks based on our project about migrant children. Another was showing a network of scientific cooperation where INTAS program was taken as an example.
We have bound contacts with our colleagues from Netherlands, for example, from the University of Groningen which is known worldwide as one of the strongest international centers on methodological development in network analysis. Tom Snijders, who created this scientific school in Groningen, is now Oxford professor and editor-in-chief of “Social Networks” academic periodical. We’ve met his students a year ago and they keep consulting us since then.
February 2-4. Kate Kuldina about "Youth (Sub)cultures in Changing Societies" in Tallinn
On February, 2 – 4 the conference «Youth (Sub) cultures in Changing Societies» was held in Tallinn, Estonia. It was devoted to research of youth from different points of view. The University of Tallinn organized the conference. The junior researcher of laboratory, Ekaterina Kuldina's report was called «Cross-gender as one of transgender identities». She focused on the phenomenon of "cross-gender" in youth communities of St.-Petersburg, such as «anime» and «role-players».
The empirical data she based on was of qualitative kind, it was predominantely observation. For two years, she was carrying out participant observation in various places where youth hang out. Actually, this was how the idea of this research appeared. It started as a linguistic experiment because their specific speech attracted her attention, and then she expanded this research topic, and the methodology has changed as well.
January, 28. Evgeny Kochkin has participated in "Global Conclave of Young Scholars of Indian Education"
On January 28, 2011 Evgeny Kochkin presented his paper at the conference "Global Conclave of Young Scholars of Indian Education". The conference was held in Delhi on January 27-29, 2011.
Evgeny has presented a paper written in cooperation with professor Daniel Alexandrov. In this work they analyse educational choice of children in rural parts of India. In 2009 SESL and BMCWS Mumbay social assistance centre conducted a survey to study educational expectations of 10-graders from 3 schools with various characteristics of small Indian town Rajgurunagar.
The researchers were interested in educational and professional expectations of contemporary children in rural India. They wanted to trace the dependence of these expectations on academic achievement, gender, socio-economic status of the family and on type of school. They found out that those children whose academic achievements are better have higher educational expectations than others, parental expectations also influence much on children's plans.
