Journal Czech Society Archive

Following text presents some findings concerning the civic culture in the Czech Republic based on results of a special survey conducted in August of 2009 as a part of international comparative research project commemorating the 50th anniversary of realization of G. A. Almond’s and S. Verba’s original survey and their classic study The Civic Culture: Attitudes and Perception of Democracy in Five Nations.

The article deals with developments of the Internet elections project in Norway. The project for the time being peaked with the 2011 municipal and regional elections, in which voters in ten municipalities were entitled to cast their votes over the Internet. The article firstly analyses Internet elections pilot projects and discusses results of surveys focused on key preconditions of the Internet elections within the framework of the digital divide concept. Furthermore, the article is concerned with results of the Internet elections in terms of several key variables: ratio of those, who cast their vote over the Internet depending on their place of residence, party preferences and age. In spite of a high level of Internet penetration in Norway surveys and the Norwegian Internet elections have confirmed existence of two sub-types of digital divide: social divide and democratic divide.

Čermák, Daniel. 2013. „Změny voličského chování ve volbách do krajských zastupitelstev 2012." Naše společnost 11 (1): 15-24, http://dx.doi.org/10.13060/1214-438X.2013.11.1.2

This paper presents findings about changes in voting behaviour that occurred between elections into Regional Councils 2008 and 2012 in the Czech Republic. The analysis deals with comparison of real outcomes of elections 2012 and the outcomes of elections 2012 estimated by a statistical model called LOCCONTINGENCY. The estimation is based on regional structure of votes for political parties in the previous elections into Regional Councils 2008. The main objective of these analyses is to find out and to explain differences between reality and model estimation. The results help us explain the rise and decline of votes for political parties, especially for regional ones, between elections 2008 and 2012.

The aim of the study is to explore the valence theory’s account of voter turnout using open-ended questions which measured the main reason given by voters for electoral abstention. The focus was on the claim of the valence theory concerning the respondent’s expected benefit from participating in an election. Data from five post-election studies undertaken between 2004 and 2010 are analysed. The empirical results reveal that electoral abstention is explained by four key factors.

The article focuses on the description of the Czech religiosity. It shows that Czech society is not as secularized as it is often argued. First part of the article analyzes the traditional measures of religiosity: church affiliation and church attendance. Using data from the Census and ISSP 2008, we show that the level of church attendance is relatively stable in the Czech society but the self-declared church affiliation is decreasing.

The article concern on the prison system. In the first part are described attitudes of public opinion towards crime and prison system. Not only in the terms of causes of criminal behavior. It also brings an evaluation of particular conditions and facilities which are available or which would be hypothetically available for prisoners in contemporary Czech prison system. The second part brings information about prison from prisoners point of view. It sums up the particular needs and problems resulting from imprisonment. And the third part comes with a comparison of prisoners and public opinion attitudes on some moral dilemmas of chosen kinds of human behavior.

This article uses empirical data to evaluate Czech perceptions of lexical borrowing, based on a nationwide poll conducted in November 2005 by the Public Opinion Research Centre of the Institute of Sociology of the Academy ofSciences of the Czech Republic. The survey combines synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and is the first major studyof its kind since Tejnor, October 1970. It broadly concludes that most Czechs accept functionally necessary loanwords, but feel that their language contains a surfeit of peripheral foreign terms, which are used too frequently and somewhat inappropriately.

Červinková, Monika, Lucie Kulhavá. 2013. „Karel Schwarzenberg a Miloš Zeman: Pozitivní a negativní kampaň k prezidentským volbám." Naše společnost 11 (2): 16-29, 

The article discusses the official presentations of the two most successful candidates of the first round of the presidential elections in the Czech Republic 2013, Karel Schwarzenberg and Miloš Zeman, from the perspective of the concepts of positive and negative political advertisement and the reflection of the election campaigns by Czech citizens. By the means of the framework and content analyses the topics and the most frequent words of the official (created by campaigns teams) materials are identified. The results are interpreted with regard to the attributes of positive and negative campaign. Using the statistical analysis of the data from public opinion survey by CVVM the Czech public’s reflection of the election campaigns is described. The results of the study indicate that we can denote Zeman’s campaign after the first round of the elections as a negative one. Zeman’s campaign has also proved to be more specific and memorable - by both, subjective evaluation of the respondents and the associations, connected with the candidates after the elections.

The aim of the study is to provide basic summary of the factors that influence the involvement of grandparents in the care for young children in the Czech families and to introduce a typology of the patterns of grandparent role. The paper presents results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The first part of the paper uses the data from the second wave of SHARE 1) to outline the typology of grandparents’ involvement with respect to different forms and intensity of contacts with grandchildren and the geographical proximity of family members and 2) to map how the socio-demographic factors influence the forms and intensity of involvement in the care for grandchildren. The second part of the paper focuses on the subjective experience of Czech mothers and grandmothers. 18 mothers and 12 grandmothers of children younger than 10 years were interviewed. The paper points out the existence of various conceptions of grandmothers’ role in the Czech families.

The article focuses on the development of terms which were used in antiquity and Middle Age Europe to denote public opinion (fama, existimatio, opinio in Ancient Rome, fama publica, communis opinio in the Middle Ages etc.). Particular attention is paid to the distinction made in Roman public life between a fama, which represented common opinion, and a rumor, which meant undervalued and unreliable opinion of the plebs. The medieval term fama, more often fama publica, referred to a local information network or mechanism of collective evaluation of individuals' esteem. It was also an important part of court proceedings. Both historic eras were concerned with rumor in today's sense of the word, which often comprised or underlaid common opinion.

Techniques using visual stimuli have existed in social research since the late 19th century. However, the methodological framework in which they are embedded remains limited in scope, especially with respect to quantitative research. In this article, the author focuses on the methodological aspects of various types of visual techniques. Subsequently, he proposes some recommendations for methodological design. After a brief historical review, the main part of the article discusses psychological projective methods, photo-elicitation techniques and the application of visual stimuli in in-depth interviewing and quantitativquestionnaire surveys. Final discussion focuses on the methodological specifics of visual methods, design recommendations and the problem of validity.

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Since the beginning of the 1990's there have been relatively large changes in the reproductive behaviour of the population of the Czech Republic, including a significant increase in the proportion of children born out of wedlock. The paper describes the development of fertility rates among unmarried and married women in the years 1989–2014 in detail. Attention is paid to three main influences which are responsible for the proportion of children born out of wedlock, and obviously above all to the rates of nonmarital and marital fertility (by age and by birth order). The analysis shows that although there has been a convergence of the rates of fertility of married and unmarried women since the beginning of the 21st century, the reproductive behaviour of these women is still significantly different (average age of mother at birth of (first) child, distribution of birth order).

Relations with neighbouring countries are undoubtedly a significant determinant as well as a key indicator of stability of international political embedding of each state. Regional cooperation is therefore logically alpha and omega of the international politics of the Czech Republic. One of the priority objectives of the country is to extend and strengthen central European cooperation with other countries of the so-called Viszegrad Four as well as with the two neighbouring EU countries, that is, with Germany and Austria.

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.

Even though many sociological texts deal with the issue of values, contemporary sociology has no unified theoretical conception of values. According to Strmiska, Lautman counted 180 various definitions of the notion “value” in 1981, when he tried to identify the perception of values in social sciences [Strmiska 1996: 375]. The notion of values is not only theoretically unanchored. The methodology is not unified either.

The initial empirical background for this study (and a springboard for analysis of supplementary data and for further interpretation and hypothetic conclusions) is based on the results of a public opinion survey carried out by the Centre for Public Opinion Research between 17 and 24 January 2005. The inquired group consisted of 1037 people over 15 years of age, and a sub-group of 813 people eligible to participate in regional elections.

Nowadays, painless connection of professional and family life is an ideal desired virtually by all parents in the Czech society. It is certainly difficult to be engaged at work and in the family life as well. All parents face the problem of how to divide their attention and time. Whether this decision happens knowingly or rather intuitively, in the end, the parents have to find a certain compromise between their professional and family life.

Causes of fertility rate decline present one of the most burning questions of our time. In principle there are two main theories accounting for this change. The first one regards the cause mainly in economical factors, that is, in the fact that young people are not provided for economically and they can’t afford to establish a family (or to have other children), even if they want to. The other theory claims that younger generations have a completely different value system as opposed to their parents.

Undoubtedly, party preferences are an indicator (and, from the point of view of media discourse, the most rewarding one) of political moods in the public. Why is it precisely party “popularity” that lays in focus of attention of laymen and expert public alike? Without the need to plunge into theoretical enumerations of functional lists of political parties, it is beyond discussions that political parties represent – along law-making bodies, government, and bureaucracy – the main structural component of the political system and create its institutional and relational environment.

The paper presents to Czech social scientists an introductory review of the concept of equivalence and the method of blockmodeling in social network analysis (SNA). After introducing the central concepts of SNA such as node and tie, along with their basic metrics such as centrality and cohesion, I present the concepts of role and position. These are treated by SNA as clusters of nodes with similar ties, something I juxtapose to algorithms to identify cohesive subgroups of nodes. Subsequently, I define and compare the two most frequently applied types of equivalence – structural, which is strict but broadly applicable, and regular, which is more liberal but has limited uses.

The goal of this article is to contribute to the study of the history of Czech sociology by examining the journal Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philosophica et Historica – Studia Sociologica (AUC StS), published by the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University. After almost 50 years of its existence, this less-known periodical can be viewed as documentary evidence on the developments and transformations in a part of Czech (or Czechoslovak) sociology. We account for the journal’s main characteristics and discuss its position and role in Czech sociology. In addition to standard procedures of content analysis, we employ the innovative method of citation network analysis. Accordingly, one of the paper’s important goals is to assess the adequacy of the methods applied for addressing research questions of this kind.

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

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