Ambiguous attitudes held by the heirs of Russian moguls may affect the future of the country's big businesses. On one hand, the children of wealthy Russian business owners have an excellent headstart – they are well-educated and generally share their parents' values. Yet on the other hand, they are not likely to become selfless workaholics. Instead, they tend to be more hedonistic than their parents and less inclined to devote their entire life to building the family business. Most Russian business heirs expect to retire early and switch to hobbies, recreation and entertainment in their mid-life. Elena Rozhdestvenskaya, professor of the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences, is the first Russian researcher to study the mindsets of heirs of biggest Russian fortunes.

Coming from a low-income, uneducated family can affect a child’s language skills, resulting in underdeveloped, ungrammatical speech, which hinders academic performance and limits one’s chances of success in life. However, parents can help a child offset the effects of a negative family background, according to Kirill Maslinsky, research fellow at the Laboratory of Sociology in Education and Science, HSE campus in St. Petersburg.

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.

Parents of school students in Moscow tend to believe that test assignments in two major final exams—the Basic State Exam (BSE) and the Unified State Exam (USE)—are too complex and teachers fail to properly prepare students for the finals; this negative attitude, which appears to be a widely-held stereotype not necessarily supported by evidence, is formed long before the exams come round. However, according to a study by Alina Pishnyak and Natalia Khalina, once the exams are over, families no longer consider them so hard to pass.

The opportunity to find an interesting and well-paid job, a comfortable socio-cultural environment, and friendly and professional contacts in the new location are all essential factors for graduates of universities from Russian regions who are planning to move to another city. Saida Ziganurova, Research Assistant at the HSE Center for Institutional Studies, studied the migration potential among young professionals.

Many young employees of museums, art centres and galleries, libraries and publishing houses move up the career ladder fairly fast, yet workplace success comes at a cost, forcing them to work beyond normal hours and outside formal job descriptions. Nevertheless, employees of cultural institutions are prepared to make the extra effort to help their organisations survive, according to Margarita Kuleva, lecturer at the Department of Sociology, HSE campus in St. Petersburg.

By choosing education for their children, parents tend to perpetuate social inequalities. While educated middle-class parents invest in their children's future by selecting the best possible school and becoming actively involved in the educational process, working-class families often feel they cannot afford to choose and instead, send children to the nearest school, expecting them to make it on their own, according to Larisa Shpakovskaya, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, HSE Campus in St. Petersburg.

The politicization and commercialization of health issues in today’s Western culture have led to growing healthism – a peremptory idea of self-preserving behaviour. This approach criticizes everything that fails to fit into the glamorous standards of a beautiful, young and slim body. In extreme forms, healthism is close to eugenics, which selects a ‘correct’ heredity. But even simple concerns about the ‘standards’ of physical condition may provoke hypercorrection, such as surgery on a healthy body, said Evgenia Golman, lecturer at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences Department of General Sociology, in her article published in the Journal of Social Policy Studies.

Social workers tend to believe that society underestimates the complexity of their mission and fails to fully appreciate the gift of caring and compassion that they offer their clients. Experts warn that social work may lead to burnout, unless practitioners are taught the skills of managing their emotions in dealing with clients and equipped with standard algorithms facilitating their 'emotional work' and thus helping to alleviate stress, according to Olga Simonova, Deputy Head of the HSE Department of General Sociology.

Russian businesses have been slow in adopting new media tools. Many companies continue to rely on official websites to reach out to customers and avoid using social media and blogs, as they are not ready for an equal dialogue with external audiences, according to Iosif Dzyaloshinsky and Maria Pilgun, professors of the HSE Faculty of Communication, Media and Design.