Youth in Sovereign Belarus: Sketches for a Portrait

The review was prepared as part of the joint “Book Review” project of the Political Sphere Institute and the Center for European Studies in Minsk.

Youth in Sovereign Belarus: Sketches for a Portrait http://elib.bsu.by/handle/123456789/43878. Edited by D.M. Bulynko, O.V. Ivaniuto, D.G. Rotman. Minsk: BSU Publishing Center, 2012. 192 pp.

Review prepared by Tatsiana Shchurko.

Youth, to speak in formal terms, constitutes a distinct “category of citizens” aged 14 to 31, whose support formally falls among Belarus’s national priorities. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this age period in people’s lives: it includes education, professional self-determination, the beginning of sexual life, and self-determination in family and marital relations. Accordingly, it is no coincidence that in many countries, and particularly within European policy, this group is defined as a separate area of overall policy in the form of “youth policy” http://ec.europa.eu/youth/index_en.htm. In relation to contemporary Belarus, this is a group that constitutes about 25% of the total population. Accordingly, sociological studies of young people’s interests and needs acquire particular importance.

The publication discussed in this article appeared in 2012 and presents the results of sociological studies of the interests, value preferences, and socio-economic and political activity of young people. The volume was prepared by the Center for Sociological and Political Research of BSU on the basis of studies conducted over the previous 20 years, from 1990 to 2012. To a certain extent, the monograph summarizes the data already accumulated and also offers a comprehensive view of different aspects of young people’s lives in Belarus. The collection primarily aims to represent the voices and opinions of young people, which naturally makes it possible to assess particular aspects of youth policy in the country.

The monograph consists of 13 articles, each devoted to a separate study of young people’s perceptions and views on various aspects of social life. Thus, the book includes studies of family values, young people’s attitudes and preferences regarding health, education and work, public-political and cultural spheres, and religion. This review will examine several of the monograph’s main articles and research findings.

Family values vs. a gender approach?

The collection opens with the article “Family Values of Youth: A Gender Aspect” (A.K. Vodneva), which leaves rather contradictory impressions. On the one hand, the beginning of the article states that family values will be examined through the prism of a gender approach, namely young people’s orientation toward egalitarian and partner-based family relations. On the other hand, the author of the article did not manage to present the research findings without an admixture of her own personal sympathies, which are clearly on the side of a more traditional model.

The article notes that every year more and more young people view positively such a form of family relations as “civil marriage” (7.4% of women and 14.4% of men). Yet the majority of respondents still speak in favor of the importance of official marriage registration (77.2% of women and 59.6% of men).

The author of the article links these data more to moral and ethical attitudes than to other factors. For example, the preference for registered marriage may be connected largely with the fact that many social guarantees and opportunities for solving housing problems are tied to marital status. Even the findings of the study presented identify the possibility of solving material and property-related problems as one important motivation for young people to enter into marriage.

State policy does not create space for the development of other forms of relationships. Yet the growing percentage of young people who prefer “civil marriage,” as well as the rising number of divorces, rather points to the need for such a space, in which different forms of relationships could be legitimized. This is necessary at least because the traditional form of registered marriage is ceasing to correspond to the realities of contemporary young people’s lives. This is also confirmed by the research findings on young people’s attitudes toward premarital intimate relations. The article states that “marriage has in effect lost its role as a regulator of people’s intimate relations” (p. 15). In figures, this means that among respondents 49.7% of young women and 66.4% of young men have a positive attitude toward premarital sexual relations.

At the same time, it is important to emphasize that the article presents data which allow one to argue that contemporary young people are oriented toward long-term monogamous relationships with a small number of children, based on such concepts as fidelity, love, mutual respect, and harmonious sexual relations. It is also natural that young people are more oriented toward egalitarian relations and a fair distribution of household duties (79.9% of women and 68.5% of men).

Interestingly, the author assesses these perceptions of young people rather negatively: “The orientation of young men and women toward the emotional and psychological component of marriage, and the decline in the reproductive significance of marriage, weakens marital ties and relations and inclines women and men toward choosing personal happiness at the expense of family and parental duty” (p. 23).

It is also important to emphasize that the results presented completely exclude data on same-sex relationships, treating all young people as heterosexual. The heteronormative lens of this study leaves outside its scope the practices and perceptions of a certain group of young people and, accordingly, any other forms of family relations.

Health: symptoms without causes

The article “Behavioral Strategies of Youth in the Sphere of Health” (L.A. Soglaeva, L.V. Filinskaia, A.A. Kuleshov) presents data from a 2010 study on young people’s behavior in relation to their health.

The study’s findings record that, despite a high level of awareness among young people about ways to maintain health and about factors that negatively affect health, a significant part of youth in practice uses behavioral models associated with health risks. The key models identified are: emotional and physical overload, the presence of harmful habits, and irregular visits to doctors.

Many young people noted that they experience mental and/or physical discomfort: 40.2% of respondents indicated that they are in a state of complete exhaustion or experience very severe fatigue. In addition, 35.6% of respondents do not feel satisfaction with their everyday activities, while 30.3% are in a state of stress.

Smoking remains a widespread habit: more than a quarter of the surveyed young people are tobacco-dependent (28.3%). In addition, 90.0% of young people in the republic consume alcoholic beverages, and every fourth of them (26.1%) drinks regularly, from one to seven times a week. Comparing studies from different years records growth in alcohol consumption among youth. Thus, while in 2001, 21.6% of those aged 18–29 had never consumed alcohol, by 2010 their number had fallen to 9.8%.

26.8% of respondents noted that they had had health problems during the four weeks preceding the survey, but only 48.5% of them sought help from a medical institution. At the same time, most young men and women do not visit medical institutions because they prefer to treat themselves with home remedies or medicines bought without a doctor’s recommendation.

These findings should naturally raise the question of the quality of medical care and trust in healthcare institutions. However, in the article, as in the study itself, this question is not presented at all. Accordingly, the negative “symptoms” relating to youth health that are noted in the article are not connected to broader questions of how the healthcare system functions. At the same time, responsibility for this pattern of behavior is shifted entirely onto young people, as if they existed in a vacuum rather than in a sociocultural space, and as if their behavior were in no way determined by the existing conditions in healthcare institutions.

Education and work

The article “Preferences and Plans of Youth in the Sphere of Work” (L.V. Filinskaia) presents the results of a social survey of young people, as well as findings from in-depth interviews with some representatives of youth on questions of preferences in the labor sphere.

For students, the priority types of employment after graduating from university are practical work in their specialty and starting their own business (40.6% and 26.7%, respectively). They are much less interested in research and administrative-managerial work.

Two thirds (66.3%) of young residents aged 18–24 would like to start their own business. In the opinion of young residents of Belarus, business would allow them to improve their material situation (54.5%) and be their own boss (55.9%). It is natural that the first five places in the structure of labor values are occupied by the following: high wages (95.5%), interesting work (80%), a good team (79.1%), convenient working hours (64.6%), and work that allows one to achieve something (62.8%).

It is also interesting that approximately one third (33.9%) of young men and women in Belarus plan to go abroad for temporary employment. Young people see departure to another country as an opportunity to increase their earnings and achieve better personal self-realization.

At the same time, the researchers state that “not all those planning to engage in business will be able to open their own enterprise and become entrepreneurs. This is partly because the educational programs of secondary specialized and higher educational institutions are insufficiently oriented toward developing entrepreneurial qualities among youth, while the activity of institutions supporting small business is still weakly oriented toward assisting youth entrepreneurship” (p. 63).

Moreover, in-depth interviews with young entrepreneurs show that most of them are not characterized by full-fledged planning; they do not always assess their competitive advantages, and they encounter difficulties with legal registration and maintaining accounting records.

A separate article is devoted to the position of youth in the scientific sphere: “Problems of Training Research Personnel in Higher Education” (N.A. Savich). The article presents a study of attitudes toward scientific activity among master’s students/postgraduate students, highly qualified specialists, and research and teaching staff. The study touches on questions of motivations for obtaining postgraduate education, the effectiveness of selection into master’s/postgraduate programs and the quality of training, and employment after obtaining postgraduate education.

About half of master’s/postgraduate students and experts believe that engaging in scientific activity in contemporary Belarus is rather not prestigious (51.9% and 52.6%, respectively), which is also confirmed by the findings of the study on the labor sphere in general. The main reason for the decline in the prestige of scientific activity, in the opinion of those receiving postgraduate education, is low pay (71.2%).

In this same perspective, the analysis of monitoring on the organization of educational activity among BSU students, presented in the article “Motivation to Study and Satisfaction with the Educational Process among BSU Students” (E.I. Lukashevich), is also quite interesting. We will not dwell on this study in detail, since its results overlap in many respects with the two already mentioned regarding the labor sphere in general and the scientific sphere in particular. For example, 60.6% of first-year students note that their decision to enter university and obtain higher education is driven by the desire to secure stable material prosperity in the future (pp. 89–90).

However, the following is of some interest: according to the monitoring data, most students are satisfied with the professional level and competencies of the teaching staff (78.2%); they highly rate the forms and methods of classes (63%) and the style of leadership at the faculty (65.2%). In contemporary Belarus, various researchers http://nmn.by/news/2694.html of the education system regularly note facts indicating a decline in the quality of higher education in the country. Accordingly, such research findings raise many questions about the specificity of students’ subjective assessment, the composition of the sample, and so on.

Public and political activity

Several articles in the collection address questions of young people’s social ties, interaction with social institutions, and their public and political activity: “The Social Capital of Youth in the Context of Social Change” (A.K. Vodneva, O.A. Ivaniuto, L.A. Soglaeva), “Dynamics and Tendencies in Changes in Indicators of Religious-Confessional Self-Identification among Students” (S.A. Morozova), “The Influence of Economic Factors on the Formation of Electoral Preferences among Youth” (A.V. Postalovskii), and “State Youth Policy in the Republic of Belarus in Youth Assessments” (I.A. Zhakuts).

These sections, which examine young people’s public and political activity, raise the most questions and reflections. According to the research data, most social institutions and bodies of state power enjoy the trust of the young generation. The church and the President have the highest level of trust in the youth environment, while the lowest is recorded in relation to non-governmental organizations and political parties. These data are rather ambiguous and naturally raise questions about the sample and/or the possible reasons for youth choosing such “priorities.”

The appearance of the church on this scale of trust is especially interesting. According to the study of religious-confessional self-identification among students, two thirds of students (66%) hold the view that religion is necessary for a modern person. Respondents noted that religion helps preserve the culture and traditions of a people, unites people, and contributes to their moral purification, improvement, and understanding of the world and the meaning of life. Moreover, the number of supporters of this view is gradually increasing: between 1998 and 2009, the share of believers in the structure of the country’s student youth rose from 50.3% to 62.3%.

As for youth participation in the civic sector, among those surveyed in the studies about 50.0% of young people belonged to public associations. However, for most young people membership in public associations is formal: according to the study, only 25.6% of members of public organizations noted that they are active participants. Accordingly, there are few young people among respondents who actively participate in the public sector, which may be the reason for such loyalty of the majority toward state institutions of governance.

At the same time, on the one hand, according to 2012 data, one third of youth believes that a purposeful state youth policy is being implemented in Belarus. On the other hand, in the opinion of young people, the state pays the greatest attention to forming attitudes toward a healthy lifestyle and to the state of sports and recreational work, supporting talented and gifted youth, and civic-patriotic education of youth. However, such areas of youth policy as housing provision (67.4%), solving problems of employment and job placement (53.5%), and international youth cooperation (44.5%) are insufficiently implemented.

At the same time, in analyzing the data the researchers try to avoid any critical position toward state policy, thereby excluding the possibility of any deep analysis of the causes of particular perceptions. For example, in the article concerning perceptions of youth policy, the following inference appears: “The youth of Minsk is the most critical in its assessments and, compared with other regions, believes that the state pays insufficient attention to many areas of youth policy. This may be connected with the inflated level of aspirations of Minsk youth” (p. 178). That is, even the thought that this critical position may be justified is not admitted, although the same study indicates specific reasons for young people’s dissatisfaction.

Overall, it can be noted that the appearance of such a publication on Belarusian youth and the data presented in it may be of certain interest. However, in the analysis of the research findings, the socio-economic causes and conditions behind the emergence of particular perceptions often remain outside the frame. The authors do not embed these studies in a broader social context, unconsciously or deliberately omitting possible socio-economic factors. At the same time, the factual material itself may be valuable for secondary data analysis.