Suchergebnisse

Around the end of the 1970s, studies began to emerge that focused on people's satisfaction with their housing, especially among tenants in social housing (tenant surveys). Gradually, research on people's housing satisfaction acquired a much broader context & it began to be conducted on national samples of respondents. In the 1980s the theoretical foundations of this field of study were established, & thanks to the spread of multi-dimensional statistical methods the analysis of housing satisfaction became the subject of numerous research projects around the world. The aim of this article is to describe, as precisely as possible, & using multi-dimensional statistical methods & structure modelling, the process that produces housing satisfaction in the Czech Republic & to trace the main factors behind its variability. The article draws on data from the National Housing Attitudes survey conducted in 2001.

Since the 1970s, the World Bank has had a new goal: poverty eradication. This essay evaluates the Bank according to this objective. Persisting poverty judges the organization's work negatively. The Bank's many policies were often even contradictory over time, bringing strong criticisms, which its current policies reflect. These are the lessons of former failures in the Banks poverty reductions policies: The Bank's strategies now concentrate on both the market & the state to promote "development." The causes of underdevelopment lie not only in bad governance, but also in states' unfavorable economic positions. It is important to cooperate with the poor while trying to reduce poverty. "Development" is not only an issue of domestic economic reforms: political & social reforms are also important. The World Bank's newest Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) reflect these changes. They should achieve the ambitious Millennium goals, but time will be their judge. Adapted from the source document.

Surveys often reveal that the number of children people would like to have is greater than the number they actually have. This article examines the question of why people actually want children and bases its answers on data from the 2006 Value of Children Survey, which reintroduces the value of children concept from the 1970s. The battery of survey questions used identified six dimensions of the value of children (The positives of parenthood; Natural drives and goals; Tradition and social status; Social pressure; Limitations and losses; and Decision inhibitors). The respondents, young people between the ages of 28 and 34, see the main reasons for deciding to have children in the positive feelings associated with raising children and with successful parenthood as a natural part of life. They associate parenthood less with responses about social norms and pressure or with rational considerations about all the pros and cons of having children, and they see parenthood as their own, individual decision. A data analysis based on a multinomial logistic regression shows that declared attitudes to a limited extent influence the preferred number of children and that the Czech population is still dominated by the idea of the two-child family with two biological parents, while declared voluntary childlessness is still a marginal phenomenon.

The article offers a brief account of the history of Hungarian sociology during four decades of communist rule in Hungary. Beginning with the brief existence of the first department of sociology in Hungary (the 'Szalai Institute', 1946-1948) the author describes the field in the 1950s, when for political reasons sociology was marginalized to the point of extinction. The revival of sociology in Hungary during the 1960s is devoted considerable attention from an institutional, a personal & a doctrinal point of view. The author analyses the main branches of study in Hungarian sociology at the time, including critical sociology & the study of social stratification, which overcame the rigidity of official Marxist-Leninist doctrine. She characterizes the last two decades of state socialism in Hungary as a period when sociology both suffered from increased political repression (stronger in the early 1970s than later) & at the same time became more & more professional. She argues that a determining feature of the history of Hungarian sociology between 1948 & 1989 was its strong connection to politics. However, sociology & politics had a mutual influence on one another during this period, as sociology also had an impact on the way Communist Party officials approached the structure of Hungarian society. In the process, sociology evolved & was professionalized, enabling its existence as an autonomous discipline today.

Analyzes the historical variation of secondary school tracking in formerly socialist Czechoslovakia, using multinomial logistic regression & focusing on the effects of family background on the odds of making the transition to vocational, technical, or academic secondary schools. I also test various hypotheses regarding trends in educational reproduction, socioeconomic inequality in access to secondary education, & the impact of political status of parents on access to secondary education. Educational expansion, unlike 'communist affirmative action,' dramatically reduced educational reproduction at the secondary level. Positive & negative discrimination on the basis of parental occupation, however, considerably diminished the advantage of higher status children in the transition to vocational & technical schools in the early 1950s & 1970s, but never affected access to academic secondary schools. The consequences of parental political status for their children's education display remarkable variation, which is unmistakably responsive to historical events. The multinomial transition model also reveals the cross-temporal dynamics of tracking in Czechoslovakia. The postwar expansion of the educational system brought about double benefits. While larger numbers of lower-class, rural, & female students enrolled in secondary schools, their higher enrollments were confined to vocational schools. Though a large number of higher status children were enrolled throughout the 1948-1989 period, their enrollments in vocational schools dropped as they began to fill positions in the growing technical & academic schools.

Americans were neither victims nor perpetrators of the Holocaust. Why, then, does this horrific event occupy such a prominent place in their public life & political discourse? With the help of the works by American Jewish historians Norman Finkelstein & Peter Novick, this review article offers a tentative solution to this puzzle. Finkeistein stresses that the Holocaust has been used by the American Jewish elites & organizations for their financial, political & symbolic benefits. Novick does not deny the role of elites & of their instrumental motives but claims that sincere & profitless activities of innumerable "private" Jews & of their informal networks have played no lesser role. According to Novick, four factors contributed to the elevating of the Holocaust to the public pedestal: (1) the transformation of the general atmosphere in theAmerican society from the "integrationism" of the 1950s & 1960s to the "differentialism" of the 1970s & 1980s, (2) the ensuing competition of ethnic & racial groups for the status of the most historically aggrieved minority which motivated Jews to use the Holocaust as a trump against the claims of other groups, (3) the crisis of Jewish identity (brought about by waning religious practices) which made it possible for the Holocaust to function as an Ersatzidentity for Judaism, &, finally, (4) the overrepresentation of the Jews in the media, cultural institutions & entertainment industry which confers upon them a privileged role in the creation & reproduction of hegemonic discourses & images of the larger society. In addition, the reference to the Holocaust has proved useful in justifying tough policies of Israeli governments vis-a-vis the Palestinians & in gaining support for those policies with the American public & government. 11 References. Adapted from the source document.