Publications

Many datasets used in the social sciences have a hierarchical structure, where lower units of aggregation are ‘nested’ in higher units. In many disciplines, such data are analyzed using multilevel modeling (MLM, also known as hierarchical linear modeling). However, MLM as a framework is relatively unknown in economics. Instead, economists use a range of separate econometric methods, including cluster-robust standard errors, fixed effects models, models with cross-level interactions, and estimated dependent variable models. Relying on an extensive literature review, this paper describes this methodological divide and provides a detailed comparison between MLM and ‘economic methods’ in their abilities to deal with three methodological challenges inherent in multilevel data ‒ clustering, omitted variables, and coefficients' heterogeneity across groups. We unfold the comparative advantages of these two methodological approaches and provide practical recommendations about which of them should be used, why, and in what settings.

Background

HIV incidence is increasing in eastern Europe and central Asia, primarily driven by injecting drug use. Coverage of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and opioid agonist therapy are suboptimal, with many people who inject drugs (PWID) being incarcerated. We aimed to assess whether use of monies saved as a result of decriminalisation of drug use or possession to scale up ART and opioid agonist therapy could control HIV transmission among PWID in eastern Europe and central Asia.

Methods

A dynamic HIV transmission model among PWID incorporating incarceration, ART, and opioid agonist therapy was calibrated to Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and St Petersburg (Russia). Country-specific costs for opioid agonist therapy, ART, and incarceration were collated or estimated. Compared with baseline, the model prospectively projected the life-years gained, incremental costs (2018 euros), and infections prevented over 2020–40 for three scenarios. The decriminalisation scenario removed incarceration resulting from drug use or possession for personal use, reducing incarceration among PWID by 24·8% in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan and 46·4% in St Petersburg; the public health approach scenario used savings from decriminalisation to scale up ART and opioid agonist therapy; and the full scale-up scenario included the decriminalisation scenario plus investment of additional resources to scale up ART to the UNAIDS 90-90-90 target of 81% coverage and opioid agonist therapy to the WHO target of 40% coverage. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratios per life-year gained for each scenario were calculated and compared with country-specific gross domestic product per-capita willingness-to-pay thresholds. Costs and life-years gained were discounted 3% annually.

Findings

Current levels of incarceration, opioid agonist therapy, and ART were estimated to cost from €198 million (95% credibility interval 173–224) in Kyrgyzstan to €4129 million (3897–4358) in Kazakhstan over 2020–40; 74·8–95·8% of these total costs were incarceration costs. Decriminalisation resulted in cost savings (€38–773 million due to reduced prison costs; 16·9–26·1% reduction in overall costs) but modest life-years gained (745–1694). The public health approach was cost saving, allowing each setting to reach 81% ART coverage and 29·7–41·8% coverage of opioid agonist therapy, resulting in 17 768–148 464 life-years gained and 58·9–83·7% of infections prevented. Results were similar for the full scale-up scenario.

Interpretation

Cost savings from decriminalisation of drug use could greatly reduce HIV transmission through increased coverage of opioid agonist therapy and ART among PWID in eastern Europe and central Asia.

This article explores how the deportation of the Dargin people in the Caucasus affects intergenerational fertility rates and assesses the results of the experiment. The authors paid attention to two Dargin settlements located in the foothills and Mid-Mountains areas of Dagestan, the first of which was subject to forced replacement, but the other was left intact. Inhabitants of both settlements have close kinship ties and are tied by commodity trade as well. The authors obtained data through municipal registers and an additional survey conducted in the studied localities. We used event history analysis as the main methodology. The main findings cover the following: the foothill settlers managed to keep the social norms along with handicrafts that existed before deportation which brought about the intergenerational continuity in procreative behaviour and higher childbirth rates in the foothill settlement that have persisted for a long time.

This volume constitutes refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Digital Transformation and Global Society, DTGS 2021, held as a virtual event in June 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online. 

The 34 revised full papers and 4 short papers presented in the volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 95 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ​eSociety: social informatics and digital inclusion issues; ePolity: e-governance and regulation; eCity: smart cities and urban planning; eHumanities: digital education and research methods; eCommunication: online discources and attitudes; eEconomy: challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic; eEconomy: e-commerce research.

How are candidates without official party affiliation able to succeed in authoritarian elections? We analyzed 1,101 independents who took part in city council elections in Russia’s regional capitals between 2014 and 2018. We found that independent candidates’ electoral fortunes depended both on their personal resources enabling them to attract voters’ support and pre-electoral deals with the regime. We also discovered that the chances of being elected were higher for those formally independent candidates who were the regime’s hidden representatives. For the latter group, the chances to win the race were boosted mostly by pre-electoral deals, rather than their personal resources.

International news plays an important role in shaping public opinion about the foreign policy and leadership of a country. Yet research shows that the bias in favor of the current political leadership is prevalent in foreign news coverage. In this study, we explore whether these assumptions hold in the case of digital news outlets in media systems outside of established democracies. We examine the representations of Russia in digital news streams of Kazakhstan and Ukraine based on a collection of news published by about 30 top news websites in each of the countries during 2018 (n = 2,339,583 news items). To study the coverage of Russia, we follow an approach combining topic modeling for extraction of news agendas and qualitative analysis of news framing. Then, we compare Kazakhstani and Ukrainian news agendas and their framing. The results suggest that digital news media in the selected cases follow expectations based on the research of offline media despite the transformations that happened in news production with the advance of the Internet.

Background

The success of biobanking is directly linked to the willingness of people to donate their biological materials for research and storage. Ethical issues related to patient consent are an essential component of the current biobanking agenda. The majority of data available are focused on population-based biobanks in USA, Canada and Western Europe. The donation decision process and its ethical applications in clinical populations and populations in countries with other cultural contexts are very limited. This study aimed to evaluate the decision-making experience of the clinical biobank donors, as well as psychological and social motivators and deterrents of this decision and associated ethical risks.

Methods

Semi-structured interviews were conducted in two medical institutions, in St Petersburg (Russia), in 2016–2017, among 13 donors of a clinical biobank (pregnant women, cardiac patients, and patients with multiple sclerosis) and three donation organisers—medical specialists involved in recruiting donors for a clinical biobank. Analysis of interview data was based on qualitative content analysis.

Results

Donors of a clinical biobank express beliefs in the absence of risks associated with the donation. The primary motivators for donating to the biobank were: prosocial, indirect reciprocity (response to or anticipation of an act in kind by a third party), intrinsic motivation (to enhance their self-esteem and satisfying their curiosity about the donation process), and comparability with personal values. A high level of trust in biomedical research and the particular physician can contribute to a favourable decision. The overall decision-making process regarding the biobank donation could be described as quick and not based on a careful reading of informed consent documents. The integration of biobank donation decision-making in the process of medical care might prompt patient to donate to biobank without proper consideration. The specific type of therapeutic misconception—the presence of unrealistic hope that donation could provide a direct benefit for a third person in need was discovered.

Conclusions

Patients recruited to a clinical biobank in Russia have virtually no concerns as to the storage of their biomaterials. The donation decision is mainly motivated by prosocial attitudes and other factors that are similar to the motivating factors of blood donation. The fact of going through inpatient treatment and poor differentiation between donation for other people's benefit and for research purposes can make the process of obtaining consent more ethically problematic.

The paper explores changes in interpretations and perceptions of masculinity in the context of peripheral and transit societies. Using the qualitative methodology of participant research and semi-structured interviews, I describe this question with the example of youth street workout community in Makhachkala, the capital of the republic of Dagestan (Russia). This republic with a complex ethnic and religious composition is currently going through a socio-economic, political and cultural transformation associated with the transition from socialism to capitalism and inclusion in the globalized world. My thesis is that within the community, young Dagestan men and adolescents solve the problem of successful masculine socialization in conditions of perceived habitual insecurity.

Despite recent achievements in predicting personality traits and some other human psychological features with digital traces, prediction of subjective well-being (SWB) appears to be a relatively new task with few solutions. COVID-19 pandemic has added both a stronger need for rapid SWB screening and new opportunities for it, with online mental health applications gaining popularity and accumulating large and diverse user data. Nevertheless, the few existing works so far have aimed at predicting SWB, and have done so only in terms of Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale. None of them analyzes the scale developed by the World Health Organization, known as WHO-5 – a widely accepted tool for screening mental well-being and, specifically, for depression risk detection. Moreover, existing research is limited to English-speaking populations, and tend to use text, network and app usage types of data separately. In the current work, we cover these gaps by predicting both mentioned SWB scales on a sample of Russian mental health app users who represent a population with high risk of mental health problems. In doing so, we employ a unique combination of phone application usage data with private messaging and networking digital traces from VKontakte, the most popular social media platform in Russia. As a result, we predict Diener’s SWB scale with the state-of-the-art quality, introduce the first predictive models for WHO-5, with similar quality, and reach high accuracy in the prediction of clinically meaningful classes of the latter scale. Moreover, our feature analysis sheds light on the interrelated nature of the two studied scales: they are both characterized by negative sentiment expressed in text messages and by phone application usage in the morning hours, confirming some previous findings on subjective well-being manifestations. At the same time, SWB measured by Diener’s scale is reflected mostly in lexical features referring to social and affective interactions, while mental well-being is characterized by objective features that reflect physiological functioning, circadian rhythms and somatic conditions, thus saliently demonstrating the underlying theoretical differences between the two scales.

A backlash against liberal gender and sexuality attitudes has been an issue in many societies, especially post-Communist. However, it takes a different shape in each socio–cultural context. This article contributes to academic debates about neo-traditionalism in the post-Soviet space and focuses specifically on Armenia. It points at some possible mechanisms that make these societies look more neo-traditionalist than they actually are. From the previous research of gender aspects of nationalism, we argue that the neo-traditionalist public discourses in Armenia might be a by-product of the national identity construction. We conclude that the individual-choice attitudes in the post-Soviet space may reflect the respondents’ acceptance of a national ideology promoted by the post-Soviet elites rather than their private practices. Our aim is to reveal the complexities of neo-traditionalism in the post-Soviet space where everyday practices are at odds with neo-traditionalist narratives, which we argue might be a result of the Soviet legacy of unwritten rules and open secrets.

This article considers the activism of a range of youth activist groups that seek to uphold the ‘moral order’ in contemporary Russian society. They promote strict adherence to a healthy lifestyle including avoidance of alcohol, drugs and sexual promiscuity and oppose those whose choices and behaviour do not conform to their own values and moral attitudes. Such ‘pro-moral order’ activism is associated with traditionalist, conservative, right-wing nationalist movements fighting for the morality of the ‘ethnic Russian’ population but also attracts young people engaged in movements formerly sponsored by the Russian state. The article traces the composition of this complex activist terrain, examines the motives of participants in a range of movements, identifies the ideas and principles underpinning participants’ social mission and reveals intra-movement conflicts. The article explores the fine line activists tread between conflict and cooperation with the state and its law enforcement agencies and considers how some activist groups become stigmatised in public discourse. Drawing on a relational approach to morality, it demonstrates the importance of interaction – including conflictual interaction – to shaping what is considered permissible and valued and how the struggle for ‘moral order’ is a site of both community and conflict for young people in contemporary Russia.

This study investigated the role of basic human values in explaining academic dishonesty among undergraduate students in Russia (N=471) during the emergency online learning in 2020. It was hypothesized that higher levels of self-enhancement would be associated with higher levels of dishonest behavior and that values would partially explain the differences by field of study, controlling for gender, age, grade-point-average, and perceived severity of penalty. Descriptive analysis revealed high levels of two types of online academic dishonesty: using unauthorized sources at exams and allowing others to copy exam answers. Majors differed by how much they reported plagiarism and contract cheating. Students’ basic values were also different from the representative national sample. Regression analysis revealed that the effects of majors are not compensated fully by basic human values. Achievement and power values had an average predictive value for the types of dishonesty making up 24% of the explained variance. The results are discussed in terms of consistency and further use of results for curbing online academic dishonesty at university.

This article investigates the idiosyncrasies of creative work in Russian art institutions through a study of their materialities. As identified in previous research (Gill 2002, Mcrobbie 2015, Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2013), social inequalities are a significant feature of creative work. I argue, however, that in order to reveal inequalities that are constructed performatively, i.e. in the ‘here’ and ‘now’, we need to further develop the existing arsenal of methods that is employed in critical creative work studies. In the Russian case, art institutions display a wealth of techniques for constructing and maintaining hierarchies, which of necessity must frequently be re-established due to conditions in the local context. In particular, the following explores two perennial paradigms of cultural production: ‘high culture’ and ‘creativity’. As these paradigms co-exist in the economy of the Russian art world, they compete for resources including funding, public attention and legitimation. In the struggle, a binary of purity/dirt develops the social space of institutions, organizational identities and hierarchies inside and between organizations. This paper primarily focuses on an ethnographic study of cultural producers from the visual arts sector in Russia’s two largest cities: Moscow and St Petersburg.

This article analyses the processes of politicisation of some identities, religious affiliations and individual choices within the context of a right-wing backlash to increased recognition of the value and legitimacy of diversity in Europe. The rise of right-wing politics and increasing visibility of anti-immigrant and anti-LGBT movements have demonstrated the strong presence of traditional and patriarchal values and subjected some identities, religious affiliations or individual choices to processes of politicisation. One consequence of the problematisation and politicisation of such personal matters as gender, sexuality and religion is the further stigmatisation and marginalisation of already vulnerable groups. In this article, we consider the experience of young feminists, women of the Muslim community and LGBTIQ activists drawing on a meta-ethnographic synthesis of five cases of young people's activism from Portugal, Germany, Croatia and Russia. Analysis focuses on the question of visibility among these groups of stigmatised young people. We show that while, for some, visibility is a matter of necessity for political engagement, for others, it can entrench stigmatisation and discrimination. We also consider the role of families and communities of belonging, which, in some cases, encouraged but, in other cases, responded negatively towards the young people's engagement.

Youth as a stage of life presupposes the gradual acquisition of skills and competencies that allow one to achieve adult status. Modern models of the transition to adulthood are increasingly moving away from the linearity and preconceptions assumed by modernist life courses, becoming more flexible and dependent on individual biographical choices. At the same time, despite the ‘privatization’ and ‘personalization’ of the process of becoming an adult, the success of the transition largely depends on socio-economic conditions, various types of inequality, and national social policies. The state and the youth policy it implements play one of the most important roles in organizing possible and accessible modes of transition to adulthood for young people. This article is built on the intersection of two perspectives: the analysis of youth policy models, on the one hand, and the analysis of the transition into adulthood, on the other. The article focuses on the discursive modes of transition into adulthood in the normative documents of the youth policy of modern Russia. Based on the analysis of federal normative documents of the youth policy of the Russian Federation for the period 1990-2020. The article demonstrates that the articulation of transition into adulthood has changed significantly over the past thirty years. There are four successive dominant types of discourse that define the framework of the modes of transition in specific periods of time: 1990s - the regime of selective paternalism; 2001-2005 - regime of education and imputed responsibility; 2006-2014 - educational and protectionist regime; 2015-2020 - mobilization regime. A key feature of the youth policy of the Russian Federation is the gradual disappearance from documents of the horizon of adulthood for young people, and the constitution of youth as an autonomous life stage. And the young themselves are increasingly seen as a resource and a group ready for mobilization here and now, rather than as potential autonomous adults.

An invariable characteristic of the Russian elections in the post-Soviet period is the relatively high turnout and electoral support of incumbents, which are demonstrated by many of the ethnic republics. The article is devoted to the study of the reasons for the relationship between the ethnic factor and the reproduction of political loyalty. Unlike most previous studies, the authors test existing theories on the basis of opinion polls data, rather than official electoral statistics. This makes it possible to include in the analysis the ethnic characteristics of voters at the individual, rather than regional or local levels. The statistical analysis is complemented by the study of qualitative data in the form of expert interviews and materials from three focus groups conducted in the villages of the Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. The results obtained make it possible to assert that the political loyalty of the Russian republics is determined not by cultural specifics, but by the nature of the settlement structure. Ethnic republics include a relatively high proportion of the agrarian population, a significant part of which is represented by ethnic minorities. This overlap of ethnic and rural segments determines the reproduction of the electoral super-majority. However, the nature of this phenomenon is explained not by the “patriarchal culture” of non-Russian ethnic groups, but by the institutional capabilities of the local administration to monitor and control the political behavior of rural voters. The study also made it possible to clarify the role of the ethnic factor in contemporary electoral processes, which also affects the reproduction of political loyalty not only to the heads of the republics, but also to non-ethnic federal political actors. However, its influence is also conditioned by the political and institutional characteristics of the ethnic republics, and not by the cultural characteristics of the titular ethnic groups.

How the COVID-19 pandemic affected the attitudes of Russians towards political institutions? The aggregate data of public opinion polls suggest that, according to various available indicators, the level of political support in Russia has slightly dropped, compared to the pre-pandemic period. Yet, this kind of data does not allow one to infer what aspects of the pandemic experience are the most important predictors of individual assessments of the government's performance. The article presents the results of the analysis of the data from the first two Russian waves of the international online panel survey ‘Values in Crisis’ (ViC). The first wave was carried out in Jun 2020; the second – in April-May 2021. The sample size was 1,527 and 1,199 respectively; 1,014 respondents participated in both waves. The main dependent variable is an integral index of political support that includes indicators of both diffuse and specific support. Regression modeling demonstrates that during the first wave of the pandemic in Russia (spring 2020) the direct experience of the disease and COVIDrelated anxiety were positively correlated with political support, while anxiety over economic losses showed negative correlation. A decrease in economic well-being had no effect on political support. Other significant predictors included right-wing political views and trust in traditional media (leading to an increase in support) and propensity to share COVID-skepticism (leading to a decrease in support). One year later, in the first half of 2021, the situation has somewhat changed: neither experiencing COVID, nor COVID-related anxiety were no longer associated with support, while the effect of economic factors became more prominent.

The article is written on the analysis of 15 semi-structured interviews with nail artists working in the city of Saint Petersburg. The beauty industry is identified as a “woman's” professional sphere according to symbolic and quantitative indicators. Care, provision of services and work on the creation of attractiveness are symbolically identified as the “woman’s” sphere in culture. Women outnumber men in professions of the beauty industry, and the clients are mostly women. The distinguishing characteristic of interaction between the nail artist and the woman client is that it includes emotional work and care in the situation of body contact. As opposed to the medical field, care is visible in the beauty industry because it deals with the client’s visual image; it can be controlled and evaluated by her. The purpose of the article is to describe the construction of masculinity by nail artists in the field of visible care of the woman clients’ bodies in the beauty industry. In the empirical part of the text, we identified and described the practices that nail artists follow within the framework of models of four structures indicated by Raewyn Connell; power relation, production relation, emotional relation and symbolic relation of the model. Men from the beauty industry which is identified as a “woman’s” sphere, produce hybrid masculinity which was named soft selective masculinity. Based on the research findings, nail artists provide emotional work towards their woman clients but not towards their colleagues. As working with woman clients, men provide three types of emotional work: controlling emotions, communication and attention. They create interaction with woman clients which is based on accessory masculinity, whereby, directly and indirectly, men benefit from the privileges of supremacy. Men opt for soft selective masculinity, if it doesn’t come into collision with their role of providers or becomes a condition for reaching it.