RUSSET – RUSSIAN SOCIO-ECONOMIC TRANSITION PANEL
cравнимое с SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe)
IDEA OF THE SURVEY
The idea of the survey came from the joint research work of V.G. Andreenkov and W. Saris in International MTMM group and their discussion of methods to study social change.
Most social changes in developed countries of Europe North America happen gradually and slowly compared to life of researchers. Significant shift in social environment, behavior or public attitudes can be traced only after many years or decades of measurement. Radical macro-level changes in political system, economic relations and social structure experienced by Russia in 1990-s created to be unique conditions for researchers to study the impact of changes in objective living conditions and subjective evaluations in relatively short time span, observe the life of people in “high speed mode” as in a movie. Russia serves as a social science laboratory where many experimental research methods and techniques could be applied and checked. In this lucky times for social scientists teams of researchers from Netherlands (Willem Saris, Annette Scherpenzeel, Bernard van Praag, Peter Vriyters, William van der Velt) and Russia (V.G. Andreenkov, A.V. Andreenkova, A.E. Bronnikova, A.V. Fedotov, I.A. Chuslyaeva) took joint efforts to organize the RUSSET. This project was also joined by leading scholars from other European countries interested in this area of research (Jack Billiet, Belgium, Peter Schmidt, Germany, Dagmar Krebs, Germany, Germa Goenders, Spain).
The project was supported by the Dutch Organization for scientific research (NWO) for conducting seven rounds of this panel study.
THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL BACKGROUND
The main idea of the project was to study the impact of socio-economic changes on the change in subjective evaluations of life as a whole (satisfaction with life) and different life domains.
The survey also intended to check several hypothesis about the relations of the satisfaction with life and objective living condition and hypothesis about the reasons of change in life satisfaction.
Along with measuring current status (objective living conditions in particular domain) and subjective evaluation (level of satisfaction with a domain) retrospective information on the same parameters was collected for 1988, 5 years prior to the first round of the survey, before major socio-economic reforms). It helped to understand the relationship between objective and subjective indicators and the likelihood of change in stable socio-economic conditions and in time of major social transformations.
Theoretical model used to study social change in RUSSET:
METHODOLOGY
RUSSET is a panel survey where the same people were interviewed after particular time interval again. First round of the survey was conducted in 1993 and then interviewers come back to the same people every year seven times till 1999. The sampling design and the fieldwork have been done by the Institute for Comparative Social Research (CESSI, project manager was the senior researcher Dr. Anna Andreenkova).
RUSSET includes two panels. Initial panel was based on the sample of respondents drawn in 1993 and finished in 1999. Because of sample attrition after several rounds substantial part of respondents were lost because of different reasons – migration, deaths, change of health status, refusals. To recover the sample to initial sample size and also to compare parameters between “old” and “new panel” new samples were drawn in 1997 (round 5) on the same sample principles and module as initial sample. Two latest round of the survey (round 6 and round 7) were conducted with both old and new panel.
Each survey round was administered by face-to-face interviews in respondent’s homes. About 200-300 interviewers participated in each round, about 34-45% changed between modules and the rest was the same across rounds.