Event history modelling techniques have become increasingly widespread in the social sciences over the last few decades and the range of applications includes demographic and sociological analyses, labour market studies, mobility and migration studies, as well as analyses within political science. In principle, event history analysis represents an extension of the statistical techniques connected with the life table method and can be defined as an analysis of the duration of the non-occurrence of a given event during a risk period. This article devotes attention to the concept of event history analysis in terms of data considerations, basic principles and methods of analysis. In order to discuss the basic methods and their potential to interpret results, the author applied the event-history approach to an analysis of the process of leaving the parental home using data from the Czech Generations and Gender Survey [2005]. The final part of this study discusses some key issues involved in using the event history approach when analysing socio-demographic topics within the Czech context.
Migration research is an emerging field in the Czech Republic and data collection poses many methodological challenges. Some of the problems are universal for the research of other hard-to-reach populations. Other problems are, on the contrary, unique, applying only for the research of immigrants and could be country specific. This article focusses mainly on the quantitative research of immigrants where the issue of sampling problem is of major concern. The aim of the article is to address the issue of sampling immigrants in the context of the Czech Republic. In the first part of the article, there is a review of existing methodological approaches to researching immigrant populations. The focus here is on potential problems when applying particular methods in the Czech context. The second part of the article is dedicated to a review of four major Czech sample surveys of immigrants that are compared in terms of their methodology and basic results
The aim of this study is to explore the sources of attitude constraints regarding the role of government in the economy, and to find out whether the sources of these constraints are the same as in Western democracies. Use is made of Converse’s approach to conceptualize attitude constraint where an individual’s belief system is seen to be a configuration of attitudes and values characterized by a functional interdependence, or constraint. This constraint may be interpreted in terms of the probability of being able to predict one attitude having knowledge of another. In this study, there is a review of the sources of attitude constraint and related measurement issues. Using ISSP 2006 (Role of Government module) an analysis of attitudinal constraints is presented using two attitudinal scales. This research confirms that the sources of attitude constraint in the Czech Republic are similar to those observed in Western Europe and the USA. Specifically, class, education, and other social-demographic variables are shown to have very limited effects. Moreover, Converse’s contention that attitude constraints are strongly determined by political involvement, political knowledge, or party identification is also shown to be valid for Czech society.
This article explores how aggregate level data may be used to make inferences about individual level behaviour. A common strategy in the past was to assume that the relations evident in aggregated data are also present in individual data. Analysis of datasets where there is both individual and aggregated information demonstrates that this assumption is most often incorrect. This means that the relationships observed between variables at an aggregated level are unlikely to be observed in individual level data. This is a problem because quite often social scientists only have aggregated data for exploring individual level behaviour. A key question explored in this article is how is it possible to validly and reliably use aggregated datasets to make inferences about relationships between variables at the individual level. An example analysis is given using electoral data from the Czech Republic.
This article argues that the concept of equivalence is one of the most important methodological aspects of valid and reliable measurement in cross-national survey research. The important topic of survey measure equivalence has not been systematically in Czech social science publications to date and this article hopes to address this gap in the literature. Consequently, the two main goals of this article are (1) to acquaint the reader with techniques that are used to find questions that are interpreted in the same way across countries before data collection and (2) to describe the testing and evaluation of measurement indicators’ equivalence or comparability after data collection. This study presents cognitive approaches to “good” question wording practices, best translation practices and the application of both ‘emic’ (culture specific) and ‘etic’ (culture universal) approaches to survey question design. After data collection a range of statistic techniques are usually employed ranging from basic statistics such as the mean to advanced approaches such as multi-group structural equation modelling, multilevel modelling, latent class modelling and Item Response Theory). This article describes some of these techniques in the context of measurement equivalence and its associated research literature.
This article deals with empirical research on poverty in Czechoslovakia from the interwar period to the present in terms of three distinct phases. First, between 1918 and 1948, considerable attention was devoted to poverty, but research possibilities modest, so that a complex mapping of the problem was not feasible. Second, during the 1948 to 1989 period, the communist regime allowed “examinations” of poverty for the purpose of depicting pre-war capitalist Czechoslovakia as an impoverished, class-divided society. A similar approach was applied to studies of Western countries during the Cold War period. Research on poverty within the socialist regime was not allowed, even after the rehabilitation of sociology as a social science. Detailed analysis of household surveys was either forbidden or the results were embargoed; only simple cross-tabulations were ever published. Third, after 1989, the opportunities for undertaking research on poverty increased dramatically due to stimulus in both the national and international arenas. Important projects were fielded leading to many studies and published articles. Statistical surveys were used to map poverty primarily in terms of income; while sociological, ethnographic and anthropological approaches were used to examine key groups affected by poverty in Czech society. Within the literature there has been to date no synthesis of the study of the nature and origins of poverty in the Czech Republic.
The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) set of surveys are an important source of comparative statistical data. EU-SILC provides data on income, living conditions, poverty and social exclusion, material deprivation: topics of growing interest to scholars in Europe and elsewhere. EU-SILC surveys are fielded in 29 European countries and coordinated by Eurostat. Although the survey is harmonised, the individual level microdata consists of many dissimilarities across participating countries because of different national conditions, methods of data collection and/or data processing. The aim of this article is to discuss the opportunities and limitations of EU-SILC datasets. In addition to discussing the development, methodology and basic pitfalls of EU-SILC, this article focuses on (a) income variables, (b) differences in income among countries and (c) impact of income differentials on data comparability. The main problems of income data may be summarised as follows. 1) Some countries use registers to report income variables while others obtain this information from interviews, and this difference lowers their comparability. 2) The incidence of negative or zero values makes the construction of poverty and inequality measures difficult. 3) There are national differences in the net-to-gross income conversion procedure. This study shows using a four country analysis that the net-to-gross conversion procedure overestimates gross wages in two countries and underestimates it in two others. Notwithstanding these methodological issues, EU-SILC is an important resource for the comparative study of income.
This discussion paper deals with equal opportunities for women and men policy in the Czech Republic financed by the European Social Fund. It presents findings of a case study focused on the position of the “gender expert” which was introduced as obligatory within call no. 76 OP HRE, area of support 3.4 “Equal Opportunities of Women and Men on the Labour Market and Reconciliation of Family and Working Life,” in order to increase the quality of equal opportunities projects. The evaluative case study concludes that the position was not defined sufficiently which lowered the potential quality improvement of the projects. Further policy steps are suggested and a broader context is discussed where the position of the “gender expert” may surprisingly be seen as a contribution to the financial stability of some NGOs focused on equal opportunities. The paper also aims to provide those who work as gender experts with an opportunity for a much needed self-reflection.
In this paper a comparison is made between the Czech Republic and other European countries regarding attitudes toward the ideal timing for childbirth. In 1990s there was a sharp increase in the postponement of the transition to parenthood in the Czech Republic. This development raises the question: Are normative beliefs in the Czech Republic regarding the timing of childbirth changing, and if so, are they becoming similar to the attitudes present in Western Europe? After a brief outline of the concept of age norms, beliefs regarding the ideal age of when to become a parent in European countries are explored using data from the European Social Survey 2006. In the final part of this paper there is a detailed analysis of Czech attitudes toward the ideal timing of the birth of the first child, using CVVM survey data from 2006, with a specific focus on cohort and educational differences. This research reveals that Czech attitudes toward the ideal age for mothers having a first child is intermediate between the patterns observed in (a) East European countries where the ideal is for a younger age, and (b) West European states where an older age preference is prevalent. In contrast, the ideal age for becoming a father for the first time in the Czech Republic is one of the oldest in Europe. Significantly, the proportion of the population that rejects age norms for reproduction exhibits little systematic pattern across Europe. Within the Czech Republic the survey evidence indicates that those who are less than 35 years old, and those who are most educated have a significantly older ideal age for having a first child than all others.
Prior to analysing and comparing delinquent groups of youths at the international level, it is necessary to create a definition of this phenomenon: what is a gang? Definitions of what constitutes a juvenile gang within comparative research are invariably general in nature; and their subsequent operationalisation in empirical research constrains research about gang membership in specific contexts. This article argues that the ‘Eurogang’ definition employed in the second wage of International Self-Report Delinquency (ISRD) Study has a number of potential weaknesses; and this study offers a solution by proposing a revised gang definition for the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.