Suchergebnisse

"The aim of this paper is to introduce one of the classical sociological research conducted by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz in the city of Decatur (Illinois) in the Midwest of United States in 1955. The subject of the research was nonformal everyday interpersonal influence in areas of marketing, fashion, public affairs and movie going and the object was the population of women older 16 years (n = 718). By means of indicators of life cycle, social status and gregariousness the research report describes the profiles of opinion leaders in given areas and provides an answer to question if the two step flow of communication hypotheses is applicable in mentioned spheres of social life." (author's abstract)

Research is focused on mapping opinions of Slovak citizens older than 18 years on the selection of judges in Slovakia. Research methodology is quantitative, research tool was a standardized questionnaire which had three questions concerning the selection of judges and others were demographic questions. The sample of respondents is representative of the Slovak Republic. The sample consisted of 1,028 respondents. Respondents were chosen by quota sampling. Sampling attributes were gender, age, education, nationality, size and region of residence (county) of residence. Fieldwork took place since 3rd to 10th April 2012.

The aim of this article is to explore the various ways in which people represent social groups. The author shows that a prominent role in such processes is played by psychological essentialism. People represent some of their social identities as inherent qualities that are based on the sharing of a presumed 'essence': something unobservable, diffi cult to remove, irreversible, and causally responsible for overt behaviours. Empirical evidence suggests that no particular causal process of essence acquisition is constitutive for essentialism in folk models of society. Some authors believe that folk essentialism is necessarily connected with the presumed innateness of an essence (its biological transmission across generations). Innate potential and biological inheritance, however powerful they may be for the human cognitive mind in the domain of folk models for biology, are far from necessary in essentialist folksociological classifications. Essentialism in folk sociology is not defined by any particular causal process of essence acquisition. Even when it is possible to detect that a given group of people claim the innate essence of a particular folk sociology, it is always necessary to look for other features of essentialism (inherence, sharp boundaries, the immutability of identity, etc.). The article reviews some influential cognitive proposals concerning folk models of society (Astuti, Gil-White, Hirschfeld) and ethnicity, and provides arguments and empirical evidence collected in Western Ukraine in support of the claim that presumed innateness is not the constitutive part of folk models of society, let alone of psychological essentialism.