Individual Group Characteristics Research Articles

Исследование социокультурной ценности семьи в сознании курсантов военного вуза

The article examines the sociocultural value of the family in the minds of military university cadets in the light of changes that have occurred in the marriage and family sphere in modern Russian society. The first part of the article reveals relevance of this problem, content of terminal values, their classification and characteristics of individual groups. The article highlights some trends that occurred in the public consciousness of the late XX early XXI centuries concerning the values of the marriage and family sphere. To get a deeper insight into the nature of this problem, the authors studied many works, compared the leading scientific approaches of scientists in the study of terminal values. The article examines theoretical ideas about family and marriage relations and the results of empirical research of social and cultural family values in the minds of students in the framework of teaching at the Department for military and political work, Russian Air Force Military Educational and Scientific Center Air Force Academy Professor N.E. Zhukovsky and Major Y.A. Gagarin. The authors provide data from the methods and conduct a detailed qualitative analysis of the level of life-meaning orientations and the most significant terminal values of cadets. The educational impact on cadets in order to form the value of the family in a military University is complex. The content of training programs in the disciplines Psychology, Psychology and Pedagogy, Personnel Management in the armed forces of the Russian Federation is aimed at solving this problem. The article makes an important conclusion that the training of cadets for family life is a significant part of military-political work in a military university, and the adjustment and formation of terminal values of young people in accordance with socially significant values is achievable with a systematic, purposeful psychological and pedagogical process of training cadets for marital and family relationship.

The contextual nature of lobbying: Explaining lobbying success in the European Union

Why are some interest groups able to lobby political decisions successfully whereas others are not? This article suggests that the issue context is an important source of variation because it can facilitate or hamper the ability of interest groups to lobby decision-makers successfully. In order to test the effect of issue characteristics, this article draws on a new, unprecedented data set of interest group lobbying in the European Union. Using quantitative text analysis to analyse Commission consultations, this article studies lobbying success across 2696 interest groups and 56 policy issues. The findings indicate that lobbying success indeed varies with the issue context, depending on the relative size of lobbying coalitions and the salience of policy issues, whereas individual group characteristics do not exhibit any systematic effect.

The individual vs. the group? Individualization and collectivity among students in collaborative design

The various modes in which individuals relate to the collectivity of a group have been fruitfully explored in research on group dynamics. The present paper applies a phenomenological interview approach to understand how this dynamic relationship plays out among design students in a collaborative design situation. Through deep-interviews with the members of a temporary design group, a number of dimensions for this relationship were uncovered. These individual-group characteristics related to instrumentality of engagement, experience of ambivalence and threat and finally to the process of individualization in which the group enabled an individual “design self”. After having presented the theoretical underpinnings and the empirical results of this study, the paper ends with suggesting a synthesis perspective of the individual-group relation in collaborative design.