LCSR Summer School. Day 9
by Alexey Domanov
On the penultimate day of the 3rd LCSR Summer School the participants trained their skills acquired last week and enjoyed the friendly atmosphere created by the organizers of the school. We heard not only presentations of main LCSR research network projects, but also saw results of the analysis conducted during this summer school exclusively with the use of just-learned multilevel techniques.
By today some participants have already finished computation of their multilevel models and seized an opportunity to deliver reports with their preliminary results. The summer school’s research assistant Kirill Zhirkov (LCSR HSE, St. Petersburg) set an example for other participants who will present their models the next day. He applied confirmatory factor analysis to religiosity in several country zones divided according to the classification of Inglehart and Norris. The participants revised the interpretation of scalar, metric and configural invariance using this example.
Elena Melkumyan (St.Tikhon’s Orthodox University, Moscow) presented her new project “The impact of religiosity and religious education on basic human values” after lunch during regular LCSR reports sessions. The author attempted to evaluate the impact of religious education on students’ basic values relying on Schwartz’s value classification schemes.
Svitlana Khutka (National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”, Ukraine) checked to what extent political involvement depends on empowerment of citizens, “individual modernization”, structure of opportunities, governance quality, social and institutional trust in her report “Subjective Well-being, Quality of Governance and Declared Political Activity in Transition Countries”. She had chosen civil political involvement or apathy, which is a combination of political support, interest in politics and civic participation activity as the dependent variable. The main sets of independent variables were values, trust and institution affiliation/membership.
A new project of Anna Nemirovskaya (LSCR HSE, St.Petersburg) “Standards of Life and Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from Russia” focuses on surprisingly high level of subjective well-being despite comparatively low standards of life. Despite enormous cross-regional differences between Russian regions along with poor standards of life in distant areas, many people in poor distant regions are happy with their lives. Using data from World Values Survey, regional surveys, regional indices and statistical data provided by the Russian Federal State Statistics Service, the author tests several models with various indicators ranging from regional GDP per capita to transport accessibility.
Francesco Sarracino (Ceps/Instead, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg) gave a new guest lecture “Reports and Presentations in LATEX and STATA” where he shared some useful time-saving techniques for exporting STATA output data directly to LATEX and for making LATEX presentations of research results. The working day finished with additional course on MySQL by Irina Nikiforova (HSE, Saint-Petersburg).
By Aleksey Domanov