It could under the right circumstances. We'll need to know though what Mac you are running. If your Mac shipped with / could run Mavericks here's what you could do assuming you have a Snow Leopard disc.
1. Backup anything important. Partitioning the drive is going to remove / erase the data.
2. Partition the drive. You'll need one partition for each OS you are planning to run. Make sure you leave enough room to have enough blank space for OS X swap files.
3. Partition the drive and install the first OS.
You can use Disk Utility for this.
4. Install Snow Leopard on the other part ion. You'll also need to add Rosetta.
You can switch from one OS to another by holding down the option key during boot up.
If you have enough available space you could set up an extra partition specifically for data files so they are accessible to both operating systems. For all partitions leave enough room for some free space on the partition.