After the successful conference that took place in Paris in 2005, ECSR is planning another two-day conference to be held in Prague on September 1 and 2, 2006. The aim of this conference, entitled again European Comparative Studies, is to bring together researchers working on analyses of education and its relationship to inequalities and social stratification in modern societies. However, the conference does not limit itself to one topic, and welcomes presentations on all relevant areas of sociological research, such as the labor market, work and employment, human resource development, lifelong learning, family, mobility and social stratification in general, minorities, social networks, and social capital. Analyses employing a cross-national perspective are emphasized.
The conference will be jointly hosted by the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, in Prague.
It goes without saying that education is one of the pillars of a modern society. Some scholars even maintain that education has replaced property as the constituent element of modern inequality. Education and the quality of education is thus not only a salient topic in the eyes of parents and students, but also policy-makers, sociologists, and many other social scientists.
The quality of education is not only a domestic concern. Increasingly, the cross-national differences in the quality of education have taken on international importance. First, during the 1960s, the main interest of educational research was simply academic quality, and cross-national research of educational achievement was used to investigate various effects resulting from educational systems, such as the differences between more comprehensive and hierarchical systems of education. In the 1970s and 1980s, interest in comparing educational systems increased, but the focus shifted more towards curricula and school characteristics. In the 1990s, the OECD took up this established line of research by launching the PISA studies.
One of the by-products of the international benchmarking of education systems has been the ready availability of large cross-national data-sets of students , their parents and their schools in the countries involved, which are being used more and more in scientific analyses. These large-scale international data sets provide information not only on students’ skills, intellectual potential and background social characteristics, but also on the schools they attend. By bringing that data together with cross-national research projects and statistical data, sociologists, economists and policy makers are now able to to analytically address questions and issues that they have for decades been able to deal with only on a theoretical level. These sources of data also enable significant progress to be made in addressing old questions and problems by using new multi-level, multi-actor and multi-disciplinary methods and approaches.
As for the main session on Quality and Inequality in Education, the following set of themes has been proposed:
1. Analyses of how and to what degree the different characteristics of societies, their economies, and their educational systems influence the average educational achievements of specific groups of students in those societies. The dependent variable in this perspective is the educational achievement of students, while independent variables are the macro variables of the societies. In order to avoid the error of aggregation, in these analyses the individual characteristics of students, parents and schools should be intermediary variables that are influenced – through the provision of opportunities and the imposition of constraints on their behaviour – by these macro-variables. With time-series data from a number of countries, it is possible to make simultaneous multi-level analyses using data at various levels (macro, meso, micro).
2. Analyses of how and to what degree the characteristics of schools and the educational system intensify and/or attenuate the differences in educational outcomes of various groups of students. The dependent variable in this perspective is the variances in educational achievement among students, and the independent variables are the school and parental characteristics, while the macro variables of the societies serve as possible explanations for the variance between school and parental characteristics.
Additional sessions devoted to other sociological topics will be designed according to received abstracts.
Proposals are invited not only from sociologists, but also from economists, and other experts. Comparative studies of several countries are strongly encouraged, but papers on a single European country will also be considered. The conference is also open to doctoral students.
Social and class mobility, inequality and process of stratification, gender, family, labor market, work and employment, human resources development, lifelong learning, minorities, poverty and exclusion, social networks, religion, social capital, social transformation in post-communist countries, etc. Papers emphasizing cross-national comparative perspectives are especially encouraged.
Those interested in submitting a paper should please send a short abstract of the proposed paper to ecsr@soc.cas.cz before June 1, 2006. Authors whose proposals are accepted will then be asked to register for the conference.
Your abstract should contain the following information:
1) Author(s), incl. Institutional Affiliation(s)
2) Title of Paper
3) Content Structure
4) Main Hypotheses
5) Summarized Methodology
6) Main Expected Conclusion(s)
Abstract should NOT contain more than 900 words.
Abstracts should be emailed as an attachment in Word format to ecsr@soc.cas.cz. If you have any questions, please contact Blanka Javorova at Blanka.Javorova@soc.cas.cz.
Hans-Peter Blossfeld (GE, ECSR board)
Petr Mateju (CZ, ECSR board)
Jaap Dronkers (NL, EUI)
Janne O. Jonsson (SWE)
Irena Kogan (GE)
Andreas Schleicher (FR, OECD)
Jiri Burianek (CZ)
Jana Strakova (CZ)
