The Urban Identity of an Ural Metropolis in the Sociological Paradigm

The article examines the urban identity of the inhabitants of the Ural metropolis. Today, urbanisation has reached an enormous scale and speed of development, and these processes cannot but have an impact on certain changes in human life. For people to live productively, there must be some common ground, something to unite them, something to hold them together. Urban identity is the inception of unity. The study is aimed at the analysis of what city dwellers think about the existence/absence of urban identity. The study was conducted in 2018 in Yekaterinburg, which is one of the largest metropolises in the Urals; for the purpose of the research, qualitative and quantitative strategies were applied. During the study, 345 Yekaterinburg residents were enquired via the combination questionnaire method (online survey, street interview). The sampling was random. Respondents were randomly sampled from city residents born in Yekaterinburg and having resided in the city for over 20 years. The study revealed that Yekaterinburg residents recognise the existence of urban identity in the metropolis. City residents attribute major significance to local identity (47.0 % of respondents). Its indicators are the residents’ engagement with the city, the urban space, knowledge of the city’s culture, and being born in or living in the metropolis for a long time. Territorial and national identities are of minor significance in the practice of integration into urban space. The survey found that every second person surveyed thinks that ideally one should be born and grow up in Yekaterinburg, passing through all the stages of socialisation, and if they were not born, then they should live in the city for at least 10 years to be a true resident of Yekaterinburg.

Health Code as Methodological Basis of Athlete Students Self-Recovery

The importance of independent recreational practice for student-athletes is increasing in today’s environment. Therefore, it’s appropriate to prepare relevant recommendations for students undergoing heavy physical loads. The study was mainly aimed at the elaboration of the content of the Health Code for athlete students to render it as a component and method of implementing a self-health system. The theoretical and empirical methods applied during the implementation of the study were as follows: theoretic-comparative analysis, summarisation of relevant data from scientific-methodological publications on physiology, physical culture and sports, oriental medicine, observations, tests, mathematical statistics methods. The study used systemic and axiological approaches of a general scientific level of methodology. The Student-Athlete Health Code consists of recommendations for selecting the means of restoring performance and improving the functional state of the student-athlete body during an educational and training day. This is a set of personal health improvement rules prepared on the basis of modern scientifically reasoned data on hygiene and valeology. The Code’s programme material includes paramedical signs of the optimal functional condition and premorbid status; the authors’ recommendations on wellness devices, health monitoring tests and immune resistance; a brief description of wellness techniques, methods and recipes; express methods of reflexology and minimisation of fatigue and immunity stimulation; illustrative wellness informative tips and recommended literature. The solutions were tested in the educational and training process of students at the Russian State University of Physical Culture, Sport, Youth and Tourism, where 91.57 % of respondents mentioned benefits in their personal health after having followed the recommendations presented in the Health Code.

Emotional-Personal Well-Being as a Predictor of Social Perception of Representative of Security Services

Objective: exploring the impact of emotional and personal well-being on the attitudes of security sector professionals towards other people, both those within their communication zone and those outside it. Methods: (1) Semantic differential technique (SD), where descriptors were represented by 24 personal qualities in terms of which the respondents were asked to evaluate two SD objects: people within their social circle, and those outside it; (2) Emotional-personal well-being self-evaluation technique (EPWBSE), where the respondents evaluate themselves in nine mono-scales. The research sample consisted of 2,229 people from different professional categories, including 298 representatives from the power block (98 people from the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) and 200 respondents from the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA)). Conclusions: It was found that representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs demonstrated more positive attitudes towards people from the communication sector, while representatives of the MoI showed more positive attitudes towards people in general. In the MIA sample, emotional-personal well-being is significantly higher and, at the same time, it is related to the dynamics of social perception: the higher the level of emotional-personal well-being, the more positively people in the communication zone are perceived, while the lower the SELB level, the more positively people, in general, are perceived. Trends in social perception in MD representatives can be preconditioned by other factors. Further to the conducted analysis, it is planned to study different-level determinants of social perception in representatives of different security services.

Formation of Subcultural Entity under the Influence of Public Sphere

The last two decades have been a time of serious transformation of youth subcultures. Researchers speak about the formation of the postmodernism paradigm of subculture and the virtualisation of sociocultural phenomena. The subcultural subject and the power that formed it continue to exist in the new realities, but are undergoing a transformation. Changes having occured to the public sphere were especially significant for a subcultural entity since it is the public sphere where a subcultural entity can present itself to authorities, thereby maintaining its social subsistence. Our research was aimed at studying how the transformation of the public sphere has affected the entity’s subculture. For the study, the authors employed the method of a qualitative half-structurated interview and draw on the disciplinary authority concept suggested by M. Foucault. The analysis was based on materials of interviewing some representatives of the graffiti subculture in the city of Samara (twenty-two people) from 2016 to 2018. The author has established that the subcultural subject is processual and dependent on the practices in use; a change in practices leads to a change in the subject. Changes of practices in the graffiti subculture were a result of the virtualisation of culture. The author has identified the changes that have taken place in the subcultural subject under the influence of the transformation of the public sphere (the ‘short time’ of instantaneous fame prevails over the ‘long time’ of the symbolic capital of the nickname, new space-time coordinates within which the entity exists, the ‘digital body’ of the subcultural entity becomes ever more informative rather than that which was created via sketches placed in urban space). Unlike the public sphere, the private sphere under the influence of a subculture ideology remains unchanged.

Intrinsic Balance in Generation Z: Between Individualization & Massification

The examination of the ‘incoming’ generation as a new sociocultural type of contemporary human remains relevant at all times. The eldest representatives of the new generation (so called ‘Generation Z’ or the ‘Digital generation’) are today’s alumni who crave to take over the world, re-arranging it in accordance with their interests and views, and claim to become the ‘leading generation’ of our century. Research into this generation, the attempt to understand it is undoubtedly an important task. This material is dedicated to the matter of defining the interrelation between individualisation and the massification in ‘generation Z’ representatives. The research methods used in the study are as follows: philosophic-anthropological analysis, content-analysis, and scientific data interpretation. The research work contains the thesis that tendencies of individualisation and massification in the lives of ‘digital children’ are inextricable and consistent. The role of the Internet in general and social networks in particular in the process of individualisation of Generation Z is discussed, touching on the problem of ‘stereotypness’, by which individualisation of a person begins to be built in cyberspace. The new generation, on the one hand, is somewhat disconnected from the real world, feeling and creating its uniqueness and individuality, and on the other hand, maintaining a sense of community, unity and solidarity, but only often through a virtual environment. At the same time, consolidating quickly and going offline as needed.

Публичное и частное в философии религии Ричарда Рорти

The article covers the religious conception in the work of the famous American philosopher Richard Rorty. The author emphasises the secular and finalist views of R. Rorty on the nature of religion, and on the philosopher’s gradual perception of the need for their creative reinterpretation due to the actualisation of the role of religion in intellectual and political spheres. The article uncovers two fundamental constituents of Richard Rorty’s religious philosophy. The first of them is associated with R. Rorty’s perception of the ‘weak thinking’ concept in the writings of Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo. R. Rorty holds ‘weak thinking’ and ‘kenosis’ to be the key to understanding the possibility of religion in the postmodern era. The second aspect concerns the existence of religion in the public space. Here the distinction between ‘strong’ narratives and ‘weak’ thinking correlates with the politically significant distinction between ‘strong’ religious institutions and private (parish, community) religious practice. Rorty believes that the activity of ‘strong’ religious structures threatens liberal ‘social hope’ on the gradual democratisation of mankind. The article concludes that Richard Rorty’s philosophy of religion presents an original conception of religion in the context of modern temporal humanism; the concept positively evaluates religious experience to the extent that it does not become a basis for theoretical and political manipulations on the part of ‘strong’ religious institutes.

Territorial and Temporal Factors of Urban Identity

The formation of the urban identity of an individual resident and of the urban community as a whole is multi-determined. In socio-psychological research, perceptions of the main factors of its formation can be summarised through geographical, historical, spatial, individual-personal and socio-cultural characteristics. The objective of our study was to describe the role of territorial and temporal factors (place of birth and the duration of dwelling in a city) in the formation and manifestation of emotional, cognitive, motivational and behavioural parameters of the urban identity of residents. The City questionnaires and the Tomsk City Identity Questionnaire adapted by the authors were used to collect empirical data. The data was processed by means of a single-factor analysis of variance and the Student’s T-test. As a result, specific traits of city image formation in the vision of newcomer residents, and its indigenous residents were revealed, which confirms the relevance of the factors under study. It has been established that the image of the city and perceptions of its potential depend largely on the territorial and temporal indicators of the respondent’s residence in the urban space. Place of birth determines the cognitive component of urban identity to a greater extent, while the length of residence determines the emotional and motivational component. The findings allow the temporal and spatial context to be considered in the development of the city brand and the modernisation of urban space. Further researches are planned to include sample differentiation based on the place of birth by settlement type.

Migrants' Perceptions of Psychological Support

An increase in a number of migrants intensifies the need for professional psychological support and counseling for the latter in order to facilitate their social-psychological adaptation. In order to organise the psychotherapeutic process effectively and provide quality services, it is necessary to pay special attention to clients’ expectations and perceptions of psychological help. Unfortunately, this issue is currently underrepresented in domestic psychological research. The success of the psychologist’s work largely depends on a clear understanding of the ethnicity, the uniqueness of each ethnic group and the appropriately chosen methods. This paper presents the results of a survey of counselling psychologists with experience of working with migrants from post Soviet countries as well as the results of a comparative analysis of the perceptions of the psychologist’s work with representatives of the dominant ethnic group and migrants. The study objective: explore perceptions of the work of a counselling psychologist among migrants and members of the dominant ethnic group. Respondents’ answers were processed using expert assessments. The study was participated by three groups: 20 psychologists (of the dominant ethnic group); 20 migrants, and 20 citizens of the Russian Federation without psychological education. The dominant attitude in the minds of many respondents is that psychotherapy is useless, ‘a person should cope on their own, telling a psychologist about their problems is a sign of weakness’. At the same time, most of the interviewees note that they (their families) have psychological problems, however, they are not prepared to work on solving them. It is worth highlighting the particular importance of psychological education and public enlightenment in order to develop a more adequate image of the psychologist and a clear understanding of the specifics of psychological counselling.

Forms of Discussion Maintenance in the Conditions of Public Internet Communication

The thematic arrangement as a structural element of Internet discourse has been noted several times by researchers. The aim of this article was to analyse the forms of the thematic maintenance of discourse in the conditions of public internet communication. The study was run in the framework of a discursive approach. The basis is represented by news publications on Facebook, and online comments to them. The discourse was analysed via a structure-composite method. The findings allowed two forms of thematic maintenance of discourse in the Internet to be defined: in spiral order, and in chain order. Spiralling discourse occurs when the event being described is localised in time and its circumstances become the thematic core around which the conversation revolves, both in journalistic Internet publications and in the commentaries to them. However, this is practically a conversation about nothing: the introduction of new topics is aimed at keeping the audience interested in the underlying event, but clarifies nothing about the circumstances of the case. This form of discussion maintenance was extensively exemplified through the ‘Skripal case’. Its indicators are a lack of information regarding the main event, thematic incompleteness, repetition, the struggle of meanings, thematic diversity, introducing new themes. The second form of discourse maintenance, namely in chain order, was described through the example of the coronavirus topic. In this case, the topic development reflects the spread of the disease across the planet. The linguistic indicators of this form of discourse are indications of time, space and morbidity. The analysis of discourse maintenance forms in public internet communication enables the revelation of some laws in the arrangement of such seemingly sporadic speech constructs as online comments.

Female Manager: Gender Determination of a Healthy Lifestyle

The aim of the study of the lifestyles of women leaders was to investigate the social phenomenon of an increasing trend in the number of female leaders in all areas of society. However, the gendered functional burden of fulfilling the role of a woman as the keeper of the family home remains the same, which sets the stage for research into the determinants of healthy lifestyles for female leaders. The methodological socio-psychological approach of the study is ensured by applying the testing method (to study the dominant behavioural pattern of female leaders). Moreover, the age-based ranging method was embraced in the form of analysing distinctive features of female leadership behaviours at a certain age in life. Furthermore, the method of scaling and defining the expressiveness of traits of a particular behavioural pattern was applied. The findings were processed via a comparative analysis of features of female manager behaviour types in the context of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. In accordance with objective data, the authors are able to state that the predominant pattern (according to the Friedman and Rosenman test) of female leaders is type ‘A’ behaviour – this pattern determines the development of psychosomatic pathology. The basic conclusion demonstrating the novelty of the findings reflects the analysis of the trends in psychological characteristics of female managers of modern businesses as follows: female managers have internalised Type ‘A’ behavioural patterns that promote the use of health resources with the maximum expenditure of psychological resources and the absence of even minimal energy-saving tendencies. The behavioural patterns identified allowed us to identify recommendations for female leaders for healthy lifestyles.