In the article, the authors made an attempt, on the basis of the results of sociological research among students, to identify trends in the transformation of their value orientations in relation to foreign migrant workers and ethnic groups that make up the population permanently residing in Russia. Research Methods. Questionnaire survey of target groups using a specially designed questionnaire made it possible to obtain primary empirical data on the distribution of the main characteristics of the value attitudes of young people concerning foreign migrant workers and representatives of nationalities permanently residing in the territory of the Nizhny Novgorod region of the Russian Federation.
At the time of this writing, within the framework of the project "Dynamics of value orientations of youth", six stages of research on the value orientations of students aged 16 to 24 were carried out. So, in 2006, on the territory of the Nizhny Novgorod region, 1915 students of secondary general education schools and secondary vocational educational institutions, as well as students of higher educational institutions, were interviewed, in 2011 - 3,000 people; in 2014 - 2,500 people; 2015 - 2750 people; 2016 - 2750 people, 2019 - 2750 people. The number of interviewed respondents testifies to the high representativeness of the research results obtained.
When processing the primary database obtained during the field part of the study, special statistical methods of analysis were used:
a) one-dimensional and two-dimensional percentage distributions, which made it possible to identify the prevalence of individual characteristics of value orientations, both in general, among young people, and in its individual groups, distributed by socio-demographic and ideological groups.
b) factor analysis made it possible to identify the main set of factors and the level of significance of each of them, in the formation of a certain set of value attitudes of young people.c) cluster analysis made it possible to record the level of heterogeneity of the youth environment, the distribution of young people in individual groups, depending on the value system characteristic of each of these groups