Family, Sexual Relations and (a trance-) Gender through the Eyes of Youth: Cross-Cultural Research

Ideas of family and personal relations, sexuality and gender identity undergo global transformation worldwide, therefore there are critical moments, which cause the ardent discussions in the world because of cultural distinctions. Public opinion, social norms affect people’s perceptions of do’s and don'ts. Consideration of a cross-cultural context of the attitude towards above-mentioned problems is the important and difficult task, which needs to be solved to understand what happens to the social norms concerning the sphere of family in the modern world.

In 2017 the sociological research by means of a questionnaire was realized at RUDN University. During this sociological research, the students from different regions of the world, who study in Russia (the CIS, Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East), have been interviewed. Projective questions, that allow to reduce the level of sensitivity of subjects, have been asked. These subjects are: relation to divorces, the appropriate number of sexual partners and the actual experiences in the past, the attitude to the forms of manifestation of feelings in public, the attitude towards gender identity (i.e., homosexuality, transgender) and the attitude to marriage traditions, existing in the world (polygamy, polyandry, the choice of the spouse by parents). Some questions were asked in the context of comparison to the Russian reality. As a result, it was possible to define typological groups in each block of a questionnaire and come to unexpected results. Thus, the attitude of students from the CIS and Europe coincides only partly, but there are much more similarities in the attitude of students from Africa and Latin America than could be expected.