Social inequality and youth: key trends of 2020

The paper deals with the analysis of one of the most important and always relevant social phenomena called social inequality, which is viewed through the prism of youth ideas about the forms of its manifestation and features. The authors present the results of a sociological study aimed at identifying the attitude of modern Russian youth to the problem of social inequality in general, as well as the diversification of its forms in the modern world and in Russia. The study was conducted in 2020 by professors of the Sociological Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University under the direction of Doctor of Sociological Sciences Professor N.G. Osipova and Doctor of Sociological Sciences, Professor S.O. Elishev with the Financial support of the RFBR, within the framework of the project No. 18-011-01106 “New forms of social inequality and the peculiarities of their manifestation in modern Russia”.

In the course of the study in the summer of 2020, 628 young people (aged 16 to 30) from different regions of Russia were interviewed using the online questionnaire survey method. The distribution of respondents by gender and occupation corresponds to the parameters of graduates of humanitarian universities. 28% of young people surveyed were males, and 72% were females. 9% of the respondents (that is, more than half of them) were young people aged 20 to 24 years, 24,84% — from 16 to 19 years old, 12,26% — from 25 to 30 years old.

The research methodology (which is based on the questionnaire) was in many ways similar to the methodology used by the authors in 2019 to analyze the value orientations and perceptions of student youth in Moscow universities. This  methodology was supplemented with new blocks of questions related to the peculiarities and specifics of the manifestation in Russia of such relatively new forms of social inequality as digital divide and inequality in health. The questions to which the answers were received were of both general and specific nature and, in general, reflected the key trends in the attitude of young people to the problem of social inequality in the conditions of the complex social situation that developed in 2020 in all respects. A detailed analysis of the answers to the questions presented in the questionnaire showed that, although social inequality is recognized by modern Russian youth as an urgent social problem, it does not occupy a key place among the topical problems for Russian youth.

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