RUI: Cultural Models of Gender Relations in the U.S. and Russia

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This research by a cultural anthropologist and his Russian colleague studies cultural models, which are standardized, inter-subjectively shared frameworks that afford meaning to people's lives. The models to be studied govern relationships between men and women in the context of marriage, career, the sense of self, dating and emotions. The project will select samples from metropolitan areas in the US (New York City) and Russia (Moscow) and from a rural town in the US (Rosendale, NY) and a Russian counterpart (Dolgoprudnyi, Moscow region). The study population will be composed of eight samples designed from the intersecting variables of males-females, urban-rural, US-Russia (i.e., US urban males, US urban females, Russian urban males, etc.). "Free lists" of data on emotions, thoughts and actions related to romantic love will be elicited from 20 informants in each sample. This data will then be analyzed through pile sorts, multidimensional scaling, and a clustering program to derive the dimensions of the cultural model. Following this phase, semi-structured interviews with five respondents from each sample will be carried out to elicit information about how cultural models are used to account for personal behavior. The project will describe the models which are extrapolated from the data, explain the evaluative ("good-bad") interpretations given by informants, show how the models are used to guide behavior as well as to interpret the behavior of others, and relate differences in the US and Russian models to general cultural differences of the two countries.