We are looking for a Graduate Research Assistant to be part of the research team led by Irina Tomescu-Dubrow and Kazimierz M. Slomczynski at IFiS PAN that will work on implementing the research project “Structures and Futures: Polish Panel Study POLPAN 1988-2023” (see here for a popular description in Polish). This project is funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (2022/45/B/HS6/04090).
You can find the Call for hiring a GRA on the IFiS PAN website.
About the POLPAN 2023 NCN Grant (2022/45/B/HS6/04090)
Ours is a time of significant transformations and resulting challenges. We witness social conflicts over the distribution of wealth, unprecedented difficulties in the healthcare system caused by a pandemic, an aging population, mass migration and changes in attitudes towards ethnic diversity, and concerns with national security following Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine. These developments impact individual and collective experiences, including people’s perceptions of the future. We seek to provide new scientific knowledge on the processes that shape Poles’ visions of the future, that is, the threats and opportunities that women and men anticipate in various spheres of life. Since the future in one area of life frequently differs from the future in another, we use the term “future” in the plural. Hence, the project’s title „Structures and Futures.”
Research Questions
How do adults in Poland anticipate the future in light of current social developments, and to what extent do such views depend on the resources and experiences that we accumulated over time?
How we will address the research questions?
To address our research questions, we will update the Polish Panel Survey, POLPAN with a new survey wave in 2023. Thanks to the sustained involvement of women and men in Poland who have been sharing their experiences and opinions with us since 1987/88, POLPAN is one of the most valuable empirical data collections in the social sciences in Poland and, with its time span of over 30 years, the longest study of its kind in the world.
To understand participants’ biographies, experiences, attitudes and opinions as they unfold over time, we ask the same questions in each survey. At the same time, to keep the project up-to-date, POLPAN also includes new topics that correspond to current important social issues. This is also the case now, in 2023. In this survey, we are looking forward to learn from our respondents about the futures they expect for themselves and for Poland.
To ensure that the 2023 POLPAN study reflects the views of the entire Polish society, we will reach out to young women and men, in addition to participants of previous POLPAN survey waves. New participants will be selected randomly.
After collecting the POLPAN 2023 data, we integrate the new insights with POLPAN 1988-2018 into a single dataset spanning the period 1988-2023. In line with our established tradition, after anonymization and following RODO/GDPR standards, we will examine how respondents perceive threats and opportunities in terms of wealth and living standards, health and health services, aging and social security, migration and multinationalism, and national security.