Abstract: This article deals with the social introspection approach of the Czech sociologist I. A. Bláha. Its aim is not only to introduce the method but also to explore the potentials and the limits of this approach in understanding social reality. The author looks at Wittgenstein's argument against a private language as a critique of the introspective method and briefly analyses the phenomenological approach in sociology to asses the boundaries of the introspective approach. Theoretical conclusions on the application of the introspection method in sociology are drawn at the end of the article, allowing the author to assess the applicability of Blaha's method.
This study reviews existing research devoted to the topic of social support in childhood cancer survivors, the structure of their social network and its influence to selected characteristics of childhood cancer patients and survivors according to the source of support. Parents, siblings, friends, medical staff, classmates and teachers are analyzed as support sources. Positive as well as negative social support outcomes are reported. Among the positive outcomes, lower levels of anxiety, loneliness and pain, quality of life improvements and strenghtening of coping strategies can be named. Negative outcomes can be represented for example by excessive paren tal care, lack of privacy and feeling of being left out after the end of treatment. The limits of existing research are discussed, too., Tereza Blažková, Veronika Koutná., and Obsahuje seznam literatury
The article presents a review of the research activities of the Socio-Economics of Housing research team. The Socio-economics of Housing team is one of the research teams at the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The main research activities of the team include sociological research concerning attitudes towards housing in the Czech Republic, international comparisons of housing policies and social housing systems, and econometric simulations of policy reforms, like rent deregulation, the introduction of housing allowance and social housing, housing finance, housing market efficiency, and house price indices.
This article analyses the recurring topics in the epistemology of the leading 20th-century French sociologist and political theorist Raymond Aron, drawing on his doctoral dissertation Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire (1938) and on a range of works he published in his later years. The author first discusses six different reasons for Aron's conspicuous absence from many contemporary handbooks on the social sciences: his deliberate avoidance of developing a system in his work, his disinclination towards abstract theoretising, his lack of interest in empirical research, and his refusal to specialise in one field, and also the changes that occurred in the social scientific context in which his work was received and changes in the surrounding political and social circumstances, most notably the collapse of the communist regimes. The author notes that a major feature in Aron's epistemological thought was his neo-Kantian awareness of the limits of strictly scientific knowledge, which he identified with the domain of causal analysis. The second crucial theme, recurring throughout Aron's work, is the indispensability of philosophy for providing the foundations for social scientific analysis, always in need of being positioned with respect to values. His enduring interest in international relations and contemporary history is taken as an indication of the third basic element of his epistemology: a passion for the analysis of singular events. The author concludes that, given his preoccupation with the singular and the particular, the key, albeit somehow implicit, aspect of his epistemology is the capacity for judgment in the Kantian sense.