2016/1

The Czech Republic and its predecessor, Czechoslovakia, have a long-term tradition of immunization programmes, with a current coverage rate of 98–99%. Vaccination is mandated by law to all individuals living in the territory of the Czech Republic. In legal terms, a person who refuses to have their child vaccinated commits an administrative offence against public health. While many experts consider immunization as one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, some members of Czech society do not regard compulsory vaccination as a clearly positive phenomenon.

This paper focuses on parents’ critical perspectives on immunization in the Czech Republic. Its goal is to present the sociodemographic characteristics of parents with critical attitudes to immunization as well as the argumentative discourses they mobilize. The text is based on a questionnaire survey of parents who are active critics of immunization practice. The questionnaire was published at the website of Rozalio, a leading NGO that mobilizes parents against the practice of compulsory vaccination in the Czech Republic. 372 respondents participated in the survey. Open-ended questions were used to invite the parents to share their attitudes on vaccination and their motivations to refuse or critique the practice.

Single motherhood is known to have negative consequences on the wellbeing and life chances of mothers and their children. It appears as a consequence of parental dissolution or birth to an unpartnered woman. There are studies of divorce and union separation in the Czech Republic but less is known about women who bear their children outside unions. The goal of the paper is to determine if the proportion of mothers who bear children without having a partner changes in time and if there is a change in the socio-demographic characteristics of mothers. As the data on unpartnered childbearing are limited, the paper also aims to map the available data sources and their possibilities and limitations.

Two data sources are used to measure births to unpartnered mothers, the birth register (BR) and the Labour Force Survey (LFS). BR data include mothers of liveborn infants in 2007–2014 (n = 886,467) but do not contain a direct measure of family arrangement. Single mothers are defined as those who did not provide information about newborn’s father. The LFS dataset is limited to households with a member under one year of age interviewed in 1993–2010 (n = 8,172). Single motherhood is defined as an absence of mother’s partner in the household. Results about single motherhood are reported for all households and for those headed by one of the infant’s parents.

The article evaluates housing satisfaction and its development in the Czech Republic after 2000. Its goal is to help better understand the processes behind this phenomenon by identifying factors that influence how the level of housing satisfaction varies between population groups. In a comparative perspective on cross-sectional data from 2001 and 2013, the authors present the main findings of two waves of a quantitative sociological survey.

The article draws on two comparable datasets stemming from a nationwide sociological survey of attitudes to housing issues implemented in the Czech Republic as “Housing Attitudes 2001” and “Housing Attitudes 2013”. The analysis was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, pairwise correlation analysis was used to identify variables that are significantly associated with a measure of overall satisfaction with one’s current housing situation. In the second stage, multiple linear regression was used to test the significance of these variables. The goal was to find factors that independently predict the respondent’s overall housing satisfaction when controlling for other variables included in the regression model.

The increased influx of refugees and migrants to the EU in 2015 has been followed by a noticeable presence of online hate speech against migrants in many countries across Europe.  The article presents the results of a study of hate speech proliferation on Facebook in the Czech Republic during the summer of 2015. Its goal is to identify the producers of hate speech and determine their social background, explore the main channels of hate speech proliferation, determine the specific groups of migrants targeted by hate speech, put the hate speech in the context of online political communication, and discuss the role of media and politicians in the process of hate speech proliferation.

With regard to the works of Castells, Skocpol or Bennett and Segerberg, online hate speech can be perceived as an extreme variety of new, rapidly evolving modes of political communication as such. Social and political activism has been shifting from membership-based organizations and parties towards flexible movements and initiatives with strong emphasis on the logic of identity politics. People may or may not engage in hate speech production as lone independent actors, but they still perceive their actions as part of larger collective efforts. When we focus on hate speech as a form of civic activism or networking, new interesting patterns can emerge.

The electronic version of the first number of the fourteenth edition of the review Our Society (Naše společnost). Our Society issues Center for Public Opinion Research, Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.