News

In August 2015, the Sixth Summer School on Business Psychology entitled ‘Factors and Conditions for Organizational Change’ took place in Alupka. 

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Summer Programme in Quantitative Methods of Social Research is in all likelihood the most prestigious summer school in the social sciences. Every year, the University of Michigan welcomes thousands of young researchers who are looking to develop their research skills under the supervision of world renowned professionals. Maxim Rudnev, Leading Research Fellow at the Laboratory for Comparative Studies in Mass Consciousness, shared his experience of the programme.

It is increasingly common for scientists to engage the general public in dialogue and involve people in research rather than communicating with them in a haughty or condescending manner. We are witnessing the hybridization of research institutes: researchers are more actively collaborating with the media, civil society, and the customers for research, HSE Associate Professor Roman Abramov and Senior Lecturer at the Department for the Analysis of Social Institutions Andrei Kozhanov noted in an article.

Encouraging entrepreneurship, providing social support services and helping people find jobs are all part of a new ‘social contract’ programme introduced across Russia to assist poor families in becoming financially self-sufficient. Using formal contracts to encourage low-income people to engage in economic activity is proving to be more effective than welfare handouts, according to researchers of the HSE Centre for Studies of Income and Living Standards.

Over the past two decades, the average life expectancy in Russia has increased by 2.3 years for women and 1.4 years for men, according to a recently published paper based on the WHO's Global Burden of Disease (GBD) assessment – a major epidemiological study by a group of international experts, including Vasily Vlassov, Professor of the HSE Department of Health Care Administration and Economy.

The book ‘Democracy in a Russian Mirror’ edited by Adam Przeworski was issued by Cambridge University Press in May 2015. Three of the authors — Boris Makarenko, Andrei Melville and Mikhail Ilyin — are staff members of the School of Political Science.

From August 17 – 21, 2015, a regional conference of the International Geographic Union entitled ‘Geography, Culture and Society for Our Future Earth’, took place in Moscow. Ekaterina Mikhailova, doctoral student at the Department of Spatial Development and Regional Studies, and participant in the conference, shared some of the most interesting ideas she managed to discuss during the event.  

Christian Frohlich has been a Research Fellow at the Centre for Studies of Civil Society and Non-Profit Sector since 2014. This year he is being fast tracked for tenure in the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences in the School of Sociology. Dr Frohlich has a DPhil in Sociology from Leipzig University, Germany. He spoke to HSE English News about his research into civic activism in Russia and about why he likes living and working in Moscow.

Overall, Russians tend to be satisfied with their country's health care system, particularly when they do not need to deal with it; however, those with recent first-hand experience of healthcare often complain about the lack of professionalism and the decline in free medical services, according to Sergey Shishkin, Head of HSE's Department of Health Care Administration and Economy, and Natalia Kochkina and Marina Krasilnikova, sociologists with the Levada Centre, in their paper Health Care Service Availability and Quality as Assessed by the Russian Public.

How can you learn to start reviewing tests critically? How do you make good tests? How can you analyze the results of a teacher's evaluation? These and other issues were covered in the summer school organized by the Center for Monitoring Education Quality at HSE Institute of Education.