Suchergebnisse

The main goal of the project was to investigate change and persistence in the ideological structure of Switzerland, to trace back to its social and cultural causes and to interpret them from a contemporary diagnostic perspective. A multidimensional and relational view of social topologies based on Bourdieu was chosen as the theoretical approach to social differentiation. The sociographic approach was combined with theories of modernisation and value change for the dynamic consideration of change and the persistence of political and moral milieus.
As an ideal prerequisite for the reconstruction of worldviews, Switzerland has a unique resource in the form of results from federal referenda in the municipalities. The long time series of these aggregates of expressions of opinion goes back to the 19th century and offers a powerful "monitoring" of Switzerland's regional ideological differentiation and was therefore developed and used as an empirical basis.
The combination of social structure analysis, modernisation theory, coordination research and regional analysis required a transdisciplinary approach in which theoretical and methodological knowledge from sociology, political science and geography was incorporated and applied fruitfully. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used for the longitudinal analysis of the referendum results.
In the first phase, the required voting results were digitised, qualified in terms of content and subject matter, classified and integrated into a database. In the second phase, cross- section and longitudinal analyses were combined to extract ideological dimensions of conflict, named and interpreted with the help of content classification and finally modeled into a ideological topology. A reinterpretation of methods of Geographical Information Science (GIS) served both to visualize the ideological grid and to link it with conventional maps. By integrating indicator variables for social and cultural differentiation, a relationship to Bourdieu's social topology was created. In the third phase, four complex hypotheses were worked on, which make change and persistence in ideological topology explainable over the entire 130-year period. The SOTOMO project aimed to combine different theoretical traditions and methodological approaches and to develop new research strategies.

This project proposes to investigate the living conditions of the aged population in Switzerland and to address the diversity of these conditions using an interdisciplinary approach. The study will rely on a survey that will be conducted in 2011 in two French-speaking, two German-speaking areas, and Ticino. Rooted in a common theoretical model, shared concepts, and common objectives, together, we aim to solve the tension between continuity (comparison of our findings with studies conducted in 1979 and 1994) and innovation (better tools, new issues, and a more national representation). In the past century, industrialized countries - among which Switzerland - have witnessed a drastic increase of life expectancy, and a decrease in the prevalence of dependency decreased among the elderly. While a substantial number of positive changes occurred, nothing ensures that similar trends are persisting. Indeed, new generations carrying their own their specificities will soon reach the age of retirement and old age. Further, the characteristics of the aged population in 2011 cannot be satisfactorily predicted on the basis of previous data since the structure of the aged population has drastically changed over the last decades. The massive aging reported in the immigrant population in Switzerland constitutes a clear example of such a compositional change. Provided these various transformations, the proposed project intends to address two major issues simultaneously: heterogeneity among the elderly, i.e., diversity and inequalities, and sustainability of the previous positive trends in terms of social participation, health, and longevity. Our theoretical approach will be centered on the concept of resources, as conceived in the lifespan psychology and the life course theory. Globally, our research design considers how resources are built through individual lives embedded in family trajectories and socioeconomic, cultural, and political contexts. Thus, we will first estimate how health, family, residency, and occupational lifelong trajectories have constructed the pool of resources available to aged individuals. We further intend to assess the diversity of these resources and the way they are managed by individuals to best maintain an active life, high levels of well-being, and autonomy. After connecting the past to the present, we will also consider how, in the current experiences of aging, available individual resources interact with accessible sociostructural resources. From that perspective, the comparison of five different political regions (Geneva, Valais, Bern, Basel, and Ticino) will be highly profitable. Moreover, in Geneva and Valais, we will benefit greatly from the unique opportunity to address recent historical changes through a comparison of our results with a new analysis of the surveys conducted in 1979 and 1994. This constitutes a unique opportunity in the European continent to examine the evolution of the aged population across the last 30 years. Finally, such a resource-based, interdisciplinary approach will provide a powerful tool to identify the most relevant predictors of well-being, in the past and the present, as well as the levers on which individual action and social policies can push to anticipate losses and/or promote successful aging processes.