LCSR International Conference - Day 4

Margarita Vorsina presents a review of the fourth day of our Conference 

Margarita Vorsina (research assistant at LCSR) tells about the fourth day of the 3rd International LCSR Conference “Cultural and Economic changes under Cross-National Perspective”.

The topic of the first section was “Social Surveys in Cross-National Analysis and Patterns of Gender Inequality”. Loek Halman (Tilburg University) set forth a guest paper “The European Values Study. Exploring the values of the Europeans since 1981 ”. Anna Andreenkova (CESSI Institute for Comparative Social Research) spoke on new data of the 6th wave ESS. In particular, she focused on trends in attitudes and personal behavior in Russia and Europe.Veronika Kostenko(LCSR HSE, St. Petersburg) presented a new project about patterns of gender inequality in European countries.

Francesco Sarracino (Ceps/Instead, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg) opened the plenary section “Well-being and Identity”. He delivered a lecture “All that glitters aren't gold! A beyond GDP strategy for well-being”. In his research Francesco comes to the conclusion, that GDP growth does not encourage subjective well-being by itself. People’s well-being depends more on social capital, than on material values. Musa Shteiwi (University of Jordan, Jordanian Center for Social Research) presented a lecture about identity of Palestinian refugees in various institutional contexts. The survey shows that Palestinian refugees retain their identity even after living in other countries for more than 60 years, but in Lebanon and Jordan the process of integration is more effective than in refugee camps. Also the majority of Palestinians considers a possibility for return.

Four lectures were presented on working section on Happiness and Subjective Well-being. Dmytro Khutkyy(National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy,” Ukraine) provided a progress report “Proactive Orientation and Individual Activism as Causes of Personal Achievement and Subjective Well-Being”. Svitlana Khutka (National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy,” Ukraine) spoke about “Civic Political Involvement, Apathy, Subjective Well-being and Governance Quality in Post-socialist Countries”. Irina Vartanova  (IFS, Stockholm) presented a progress report, which aims to answer the question “Does belonging to the creative class make people happier?” She comes to the conclusion that the greatest impact on subjective well-being has job satisfaction, while the effect of belonging to the creative class is negligible. Luca Stanca, the economist from the university of Milan-Bicocca, closed the section. He vividly told about the geography of happiness and about the impact of economic performance on subjective well-being.

The topic of the final section was “Quality of life, Happiness, Social Capital and Innovative Consumption”. Anna Nemirovskaya (LCSR HSE, St Petersburg) demonstrated the results of a study on the standards of life and subjective well-being in Russia. Małgorzata Mikucka (Universite catholiqu´e de Louvain, Belgium) and Francesco Sarracino (STATEC Luxembourg, Gesis Germany) presented a new project in which they are going to use the multilevel regression to explain the Easterlin paradox. Luciano Canova(Enrico Matteo School, Milan, Italy) also reported on a new project about impact of such factors as ability to predict his level of happiness and ability to compare his level of happiness with others on individual level of happiness. Report "Social Determinants of Innovative Consumption Practices" by Natalia Firsova (HSE, Moscow) closed the fourth day of LCSR International Conference.

By Margarita Vorsina