Housing Problem of Orphans Addressed by

Russian Local Media

The International Conference on Communication, Development and

Human Rights: Social Change and Media Flows

Autonomous University of BarcelonaNovember, 6-8 2013

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Motivation

The focus is mainly on international relations rather than on the essence of

the problem – Orphan Care

Russian Orphan Care attracts the world media spotlight

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Background

Federal State Statistics Service / Online Data:

http://gks.ru/bgd/regl/b12_13/Main.htm

(in Russian)

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DefinitionsOrphans – (for the purposes of this research) are children whose parents died as well as children left parentless due to other reasons (parents addicted to alcohol, court orders, etc.)

Housing problem – a broad concept implying vital needs of a person and including the complex system of exercising housing rights, issues of household services (chores), etc.

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ApproachThe theoretical foundation of the research is taken from Pierre Bourdieu and Herbert Blumer, who postulate:

People’s awareness of social problems is mediated by the information engendered by means of mass communication.

Mass Media InformationPeople’s

awareness

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Data

Orlovskaya Pravda is the chief newspaper in the Orel region

First edition — 1917

2А format

Various number of columns (at least 8)

Circulation  — 15,000 issues

Frequency — 4 times a week (Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday).

http://opravda.ru/

Integrum is the largest factual mass media archives in the CIS countries and Eastern Europe. The system allows for search and automated monitoring of the data base of over 25,000 print sources, television channels and blogs.

About 800,000,000 documents open for access

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Method The publications were filtered by the

key words ‘housing ‘ and ‘orphans’ for the period from 01.01.2003 to 01.01.2013. The articles were selected if both words were used in the same context.

175 texts were analyzed (articles, stories, legal overviews)

The selected articles were sorted according to the adopted categories ‘Lifestyle of Orphans’ and ‘Work Done by the Officials’ with regard to the date of publishing and organized in MS Excel 2003 on the basis of discourse analysis

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Findings

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Conclusion

The growth of publications in the regional mass media highlighting the housing problem is observable. The growing attention to the problem is proportional to the growing support provided by the state.

The regional printed press focuses on the beneficial work of the local authorities rather than presents the reality (interviews with orphans, expert comments on the protection of rights, ways to overcome red tape barriers, etc.)

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Thank you

Questions are welcome

NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

www.hse.ru

Sergey Vinkov, svinkov@hse.ru