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Regular version of the site
Important announcements 1

Events

May, 26 — regular seminar

Event ended

Topic: “Understanding Public Support for the Right to Euthanasia: Structure of Public Discourse, Values, Traditional Religiosity and Trust”
Speaker: Maksim Rudnev(Leading Research Fellow at the Laboratory for Comparative Studies in Mass Consciousness; Associate Professor at theFaculty of Social Sciences, HSE)

The Laboratory for Comparative Social Research announces the next  regular seminar, which will be held in Moscow (Myasnitskaya st., 22, room 511) on May 26 at 18-00 p.m. Maksim Rudnev (Leading Research Fellow at the Laboratory for Comparative Studies in Mass Consciousness; Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, HSE) will deliver a report “Understanding Public Support for the Right to Euthanasia: Structure of Public Discourse, Values, Traditional Religiosity and Trust”. The discussant is Anna Shirokanova (LCSR, Senior research fellow). 

The justifiability of euthanasia is a largely discussed issue among the medical experts and terminally ill patients. During recent decades this topic has entered public discussion among lay people and became a concern for public policy. Public opinion regarding justifiability of euthanasia gain importance in developing corresponding policies. Thus attention to the determinants of justifiability of euthanasia among lay people attracted attention of researchers (for ex. Cohen et al. 2014). There are several sporadic studies of public attitude determinants from different disciplines. This project attempts to integrate the arguments for and against euthanasia, relate it to the determination of attitudes and test these theoretical claims with the available data.

At first, the structure of discourse around the right to euthanasia among "lay" people is revisited. It is shown that the type of questions raised highly depends on the level of awareness and involvement of people, which in general among lay people is very low. Thus, the main predictors of public support for the right to euthanasia should be determinants of the very general attitude.

Four hypotheses regarding the justifiability of euthanasia are reformulated regarding traditional religiosity, the values of autonomy, their interactions and effects of vulnerability (fears of abuse). The multilevel analysis of the data from the 5th wave of World Values Survey showed that across 35 countries both traditional religiosity and human values have significant and independent impacts on the recognition of the right to euthanasia. Multilevel path analysis demonstrated that the effect of religiosity is partially mediated by the both values of autonomy and conservative ones. In addition, as a result of the low level of general public awareness of the topic, different kinds of capital have an inconsistent impact.

Specific study of the role of interpersonal trust employing data from European Values Study demonstrated that it does not matter for lay people's support for the right to euthanasia since their level of awareness is low and they make such judgements using their basic values and moral emotions rather than thinking of procedural details. In contrary, institutional trust has a negative effect at the individual level, and confidence in healthcare system has positive and robust effect at the country level. We conclude that although for informed people such as physicians and patients specific trust might be the main determinant of their attitude towards euthanasia, for lay people generalized trust does not take an effect.

These results support the proposed structure of the public discourse and emphasizes the crucial role of public awareness of the end-of-life issues.

We conclude with a discussion of the competing and additive roles of religiosity and the values of autonomy as modern regulators of public moral attitudes.

Everyone interested is invited!

Working language is Russian.

Videoconference with St. Petersburg office of the LCSR (room 303, 55-2, Sedova st.) will be provided. Guests from St. Petersburg are invited to make a request for a pass to the building to Olesya Volchenko (ovolchenko@hse.ru) by 2 pm of the seminar’s day.

Guests from Moscow are free to enter to the 5th floor from 17:45 till 18:15. For questions: +7-495-772-95-90 extension number 12244.

Also after the seminar a videotape will be put up after the summary of the presentation.