Trust, responsibility, and freedom: focus-group research on modern patterns of union formation in Russia

This paper highlights the insights from focus group research on childbearing within cohabitation in Russia, conducted as a part of comparative international research on the topic. The goal of the study is to provide deeper understanding of underlying patterns for people choice of the type of union. Russia is an interesting case study because legislation here is unfavourable to cohabitation, prioritizing marriage, yet raising number of people do cohabit, especially in the last decades. Free discussions on 8 focus groups in Moscow revealed deep issue of trust between man and woman (understood differently), lying in the basis of preferences for marriage or cohabitation. Lack of trust to the State makes legal restrictions virtually irrelevant. Religious beliefs of participants provide with foundation for ‘three stages of commitment’ theory, where cohabitation marks the lowest commitment, marriage the average, and wedding in a church the highest. Accordingly, marriage ought to take place several years before wedding. Children serve as a pretext, but not a reason, to marry. In-depth values of responsibility, freedom, ‘property’ and gender (in)equality form men and women behaviour in studied area. More detailed analysis of how the revealed underlying factors interplay will be developed in the full paper.