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Family plans and career plans among higher education students in the field of social sciences based on a pilot study in Eastern Hungary
71-93Views:53Our paper explores the family and career plans of social sciences students at Hungary’s second largest university based on a questionnaire-based pilot study. Nowadays, careers include more than the traditional vertical promotion within an organisation, as seen from the emergence of the self-directed “protean” career type, which prompts organisations to adapt to individuals’ values, attitudes, and own career definitions. In addition, the Kaleidoscope Career Model sets out that individuals adapt their career goals to their life stages. Thus, students’ career and family plans matter to prospective employers. Our results show that a modern self-directed career type has emerged among students, for whom it is a priority to meet their own expectations. In several cases, starting a family is preceded by career goals. Furthermore, despite the “feminine” nature of social sciences, our pilot study shows that male students in the field still tend to conform to traditional gender roles regarding the importance of family and career. Our research implies that prospective employers need to adapt their HR strategies to young people’s family and career plans. Moreover, organisations should support students in gaining relevant work experience and in achieving their subsequent career plans.
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About the Understanding of Discursive Social Sciences and its Possible Aspects
93-107Views:18This article observes a paradigm shift occurred in several disciplines of social science which
also differs in theoretical and methodological aspects from science pursuing objectivity. The
interpretative social sciences primarily focus on the study of meaning and sets texts and talks
into the centre of understanding. Social facts are taking place in an intersubjective sphere,
namely among each other. In this paper they are consequently called ‘socially meaningful facts’.
Therefore, understanding and meaning of these socially meaningful facts can be study without
snapping social reality by means of different survey techniques, which would also necessarily
reduce the richness of social meanings.
In this paper the vote is given for the transition of discourse approach into a paradigm.
A couple of aspects are introduced in order to make an attempt to prove its scientific significance. On the other hand misunderstandings are also falsified. According to these misconceptions, a
text-based approach and an actual postmodern scientific scheme is nothing else than a literary
project, which also denies the pure existence of reality and only considers all previous knowledge
as relative. Instead of that, this paper states that every single fact of society has meaning which
is mediated through narratives by the language itself. -
The characteristics of social contact intensity, contact frequency and contact structure in Hungary in 2006 and 2015
102-138Views:22The study aims at comparing the Hungarian results of the questions on the frequency of personal and distance contact with relatives and friends in the 2006 and 2015 ad hoc modules of EU-SILC. According to our results, in line with the findings of previous Hungarian research, compared to 2006, there were fewer contacts in Hungary in 2015. Relations with friends, especially those held in person, were less exposed to weakening compared to relations with relatives. Among the different social groups, the already disadvantaged were typically negatively affected by either the change in intensity or the structure of relationships. However, the situation of the elderly and the inhabitants of deprived households deteriorated in all three dimensions examined: their relations weakened more strongly, and those related to relatives and personal ones further narrowed by 2015. This result indicates that the social disintegration of these groups has accelerated particularly between the two years, which poses a serious social policy challenge.
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Online activities of Alzheimer Cafes in the 6 months preceding and following the coronavirus outbreak
42-64Views:40Alzheimer Cafés may play an important psychosocial supporting role in the life of people living with dementia and of their family caregivers by providing a community of understanding, inclusion, solidarity and mutual support. They can promote policy-, professional- and social discourses, the recognition of dementia as a social reality, and overall awareness of this complex challenge. They can also foster transdisciplinary collaboration among professionals as well as between professionals and lay people affected by dementia based on mutual understanding, catalysing the formation and operation of acting communities and networks of interest.
The active and purposeful presence and activities of Alzheimer Cafés on Internet platforms, in the increasingly prominent channels and fields of social discourse and community life in the 21st century, can be an important tool in the realization of these benefits.
This two-part paper analyses the publicly accessible online footprint and behaviour of Alzheimer Cafés from this perspective as measured by a list of 10 possible functions. It scrutinizes the realisation of possible benefits and advantages offered by Internet platforms between September 2019 and August 2020, with a special focus on technology-based adaptive responses to the coronavirus-outbreak midway through that period.
The first part of the paper (Kucsera – Holpert 2021) briefly overviewed the Alzheimer Café concept and its history in Hungary, presented the methodology of the study and the first half of the research results. This second part of the paper presents the rest of the results, and makes recommendations for making more effective use of the potential of online platforms to realise the goals.
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Online activities of Alzheimer Cafes in the 6 months preceding and following the coronavirus outbreak
19-41Views:29Alzheimer Cafés may play an important psychosocial supporting role in the life of people living with dementia and of their family caregivers by providing a community of understanding, inclusion, solidarity and mutual support. They can promote policy-, professional- and social discourses, the recognition of dementia as a social reality, and overall awareness of this complex challenge. They can also foster transdisciplinary collaboration among professionals as well as between professionals and lay people affected by dementia based on mutual understanding, catalysing the formation and operation of acting communities and networks of interest.
The active and purposeful presence and activities of Alzheimer Cafés on Internet platforms, in the increasingly prominent channels and fields of social discourse and community life in the 21st century, can be an important tool in the realization of these benefits.
This two-part paper analyses the publicly accessible online footprint and behaviour of Alzheimer Cafés from this perspective as measured by a list of 10 possible functions. It scrutinizes the realisation of possible benefits and advantages offered by Internet platforms between September 2019 and August 2020, with a special focus on technology-based adaptive responses to the coronavirus-outbreak midway through that period.
This first part of the paper, which briefly overviews the Alzheimer Café concept and its history in Hungary, and then presents the methodology of the study and the first half of the research results. The second part of the paper will continue to present the results, and will make recommendations for making more effective use of the potential of online platforms to realise the goals.
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Preferred leadership style, leadership and entrepreneurial inclination among university students
3-26Views:20Although many researches have been conducted on leadership styles and university students
are participants in exploratory social science research quite frequently, fewer examples can be
found on the application of the Full Range Leadership model among the youth. In this article,
the authors examine preferred leadership styles among Hungarian students, and map their
connections with managerial and entrepreneurial inclination. The online questionnaire used inthe research was completed by university students studying economics, technology and social
studies in the capital and beyond. The questionnaire was completed by 335 university students.
The results are exploratory, and they seem to modify the existing typologies. Four distinct
leadership styles could be observed within the target group, embodying the transformative,
supportive, defensive, and laissez-faire leadership types. Based on multivariate analysis one may
suppose that among students leadership willingness is positively connected to transformative
leadership, while entrepreneurial inclination to the transformative and supportive styles. -
Interpersonal relationships in Hungary – an overview
72-93.Views:16Our paper aims to demonstrate that social structure has significant impact on the formation of
interpersonal relations. We review and analyse the characteristics of ego-centric interpersonal
networks of Hungarians based on data from nationally representative adult population surveys
between the mid-1980’s up to 2015. We focus especially on core discussion networks, friendship
ties and weak ties and analyse how the transition to market economy influenced interpersonal
relationships. As expected, the large-scale social changes brought about by the transition
changed interpersonal networks as well. During the first decade of the transition (in the 1990’s)
one could not witness a significant change of personal networks, nonetheless the adaptation
process was easier for people supported by strong, traditional family ties. Non-kin ties, especially
friendships seem to gain significance at the expense of kin relationships. Overall, resources
available through weak ties seem to be decreasing. -
An Old-New Group on the Labour Market: the Precariat
3-40.Views:31The Precariat as social class is a core issue in social sciences. The authors contribute to this debate by introducing two approaches to measures the size and the social charateristics of the Precariat using two quantitative database. They estimate the size of the Precariat as a group on the labour market, and compare its social position with two other labour groups of the seg-mentation theory (the secondary and the lower primary). They found that while the standard of living condition of the Precariat is more akin to the secundary segment, the values and the level of satisfaction is more similar to the lower primary segment.
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Investigation of working conditions and risk factors for burnout of social and pedagogical professionals
3-29Views:26The study scrutinizes the relationship between professional working conditions and burnout among Hungarian social and pedagogical professionals. Despite the fact that burnout and occupational well-being have been extensively researched abroad among professional helpers – primarily health care workers –, no quantitative survey has been conducted in Hungary so far in the target group we examined. Another added value of our study is that, besides work and organizational factors revealed by previous burnout studies, it points to the role of client- and fieldwork-related difficulties in the prevalence of burnout symptoms. In our exploratory, crosssectional survey, 261 social and pedagogical specialists participated from Baranya County. Our results suggest that job and task matching problems, and difficulties related to the fieldwork and clients lead to emotional exhaustion of professionals and decreased work efficiency. Deficiencies related to work motivation cause loss of efficiency as well. The results also indicate that out of the three occupational groups involved in the research, professionals working in the field of child protection are most at risk for emotional exhaustion, and the symptom of depersonalization is most relevant to child protection and family and child welfare workers. In addition, we have shown that longer professional experience can be considered a protective factor in burnout symptoms. Our results can make an important contribution to the establishment of individual and organizational level training, support, development, monitoring and evaluation programs and/or policy-level guidelines and interventions that can improve the working conditions of professionals and reduce their risk of emotional, mental and physical strain.
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New ways in exporting Society: The potential of donation.based digital data collection
6-26.Views:18More and more digital data is being generated every day, and more and more social science
analyses are using Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook data. Many international and national studies
have already explored the social science opportunities and dilemmas raised by the phenomenon
of ‚big data’ - but the issue of ‚access to data’ has only been touched upon tangentially. And
access to data is becoming increasingly difficult. What can we do if market players close the
access to their data, and, if we find data available, the Research Ethics Board tells us to stop? The
answer is simple: go to the users and ask them for the data. This approach is what the literature
calls data donation. This paper will describe the data donation approach in detail, focusing on
how researchers can access data through users on the current major Western platforms. The
practical feasibility of data donation access will be illustrated based on a domestic pilot study. -
Hungarian Videoblogger Networks Online
43-67.Views:10The web 2.0 phenomenon and social media – without question – not only reshaped our everyday experiences, but they have established an environment for new types of social practices and social actors. The demotization (Turner 2010) effect of such technologies has created entirely new fields where celebrities might emerge from: one of them is videoblogging. Many video bloggers gained great reputation through peculiar micro-celebrity practices (Marwick 2015, Senft 2012), and, as a result, became key figures in distributing ideas, values and knowledge in today’s society. These cognitive patterns are disseminated with a discursive apparatus that is largely based on social media activity, including posts, tweets, self-imagery and the videos themselves, which are tied to a certain logic according to environmental affordances, creating the possibility for fans to interact (share, comment, like, retweet etc.) with artifacts of the celebrity. This mechanism puts the celebrity in a so-called expert system (Giddens 1990) position as they provide adequate schemas of attitude, mentality or behavior. Most importantly, all of these public interactions are accessible for scholars to conduct scientific research. With the help of the SentiOne application this research attempts to reconstruct online networks of video bloggers based on mentions, which either occurred in an artifact (post, video description etc.) or in a fan comment. Apart from the network itself, SentiOne enables us to get insights regarding each individual connection established in it with different types of aggregated data.
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Utopia and Social Science – Interpretation of the book Fahrenheit 451
98-108Views:35Utopian and dystopian works have traditions hundreds of years, but their golden era did not begin until the 20th century. The genre is very often depicted as a literary genre, but in reality it is much more than simple fiction. These novels are as much social science and social theory writings as they are works of phantasmagoria. In my writing, I strive to explain this line of thought based on Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451. In the course of my work, following the fictional story of Guy Montag, I intend to present the peculiarities of the genre, its social science relations and its relationship with our contemporary society, in parallel with other dystopian works of the 20th century.
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Social media communication in the digital medical space: A #cysticfibrosis és a #Asthma Big Data összehasonlító elemzése
143-180.Views:14In the environment of 21st century technology, the transformation of information acquisition
of health care and patients has had an increasing emphasis. Despite the earlier authoritative
doctor-patient relationship, a need for an equal, cooperation-based communication has emerged
and there are so many digital healthcare projects to achieve this (Koskova 2015).
Information acquisition on the internet has allowed patients that based on the increasingly
available medical information they acquire information about their condition, become part of
patient communities, ask for second opinions, and become committed helpers of their doctors in
their disease (Meskó et. al 2017).
This can be especially true for patients with rare diseases, where a diagnosis might take even
a decade, the patient needs lifelong condition maintenance and treatment, if it is available. While the proportion of patients with rare diseases is low compared to the whole of society, the number of such patients is approximately 30 million in Europe (EURORDIS), which means patients
and their relatives need not only a harmonized health care system, but extensive information so
that they can live with the rare disease with less difficulty.
The aim of our study was to present the options of information acquisition in the social
media, focusing on Twitter, via an interdisciplinary and social approach. In this study therefore
we carried out a Big Data based social media analysis based on #Asthma and #CysticFibrosis
databases of the Symplur corporation. This study results contain the complete online communication of 7 years (2012-2019) regarding these hashtags. The analysis has few levels including
semantic research, stakeholder and hashtag review, engagement, and the whole tweet activity
exploration. -
College and university students’ attitudes towards democracy in Hungary
47-69Views:20The existence of education for democracy has positive impact on citizens’ political knowledge
and the identification with the democratic values. In the process of civic education, the
universities and high schools play an important role. Many scholars argue that the high schools
have a civic mission to serve a public good or the university is the civic mission itself. To examine
democratic citizenship among high school and university students we use a dataset composed of
three surveys (2011/2012, 2013, 2015) of 4800 Hungarian students. We build on the literature
about the empirical and theoretical framework of democratic citizenship to answer the question
if 25 years after the collapse of communism we can witness the emergence of a new generation
of democrats in Hungary? Have young people successfully come to terms with their countries' authoritarian past and developed a commitment to democracy as a system of rule? Are they
ready to defend it in the face of challenges? Based on the empirical framework of citizenship we
derive a number of significant lessons from the Hungarian case, with important implications
about the ability to teach the norms and responsibilities of democratic citizenship in the world’s
emerging democracies. -
Peer-group ties and a prison sentence: a chance to enhance successful re-entry
52-82Views:37Interpersonal relationships of prisoners are of key importance from the aspect of their reintegration. We focus our attention on non-kin, primarily friendship ties on a sample of young Hungarian males convicted for the first time, for a relatively short period of up to 3 years. In our longitudinal qualitative research, 80 offenders from eight penal institutions were interviewed while serving their sentence and 31 of them could also be reached 6 months after they left the prison. We analyse what significance prisoners attribute to their friendship ties, how these change during the prison sentence, which factors influence their sustainment or dissolution, weakening or strengthening.
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Social policy model change in Hungary in the light of post-2010 governance
28-42Views:162Hungarian social policy underwent a major shift in emphasis following the change of government in 2010. The aim of this study is to examine the direction of these changes of emphasis compared to the models used by Esping-Andersen to typify welfare states. The analysis uses the classical criteria of the models and analyses changes in social policy principles, goals and instruments in five areas. In the areas of employment, family policy, tax policy, housing policy and crisis management, we would like to show that in Hungary we cannot currently speak of a purely conservative social policy model as declared by the government. The conclusion of our study is that the Hungarian system currently uses mixed elements, although the declared values are conservative and the authorities try to preserve conservative structures and actors, there is a significant shift in emphasis in social policy, and the mixed model shows strong liberal elements.
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The place and role of field studies in teaching medical sociology
44-55Views:27Introduction: The goals of the subject of Medical sociology are to familiarize and explain the relationships between social environment and health. The theoretical and practical elements of the medical sociology education and the field studies that form a part of practical work serve these goals. During filed studies, we build on the previous knowledge and experience of the
students. Method: The themes of the field studies change from semester to semester. From the series of studies we picked three themes that were connected to and built on each other. We present the role of field studies through their description and the explanation of our experiences. Results: Field studies add empirical skills and experience to the knowledge acquired during the
theoretical and practical training of medical sociology. The field study assignments also serve to strengthen the effects of the “hidden curriculum”, the process of the indirect professional socialization at the medical school. Furthermore, the new knowledge and skills give the students a better understanding of the scientific literature helping them in the interpretation of statistical
and methodological aspects of biomedical results and concepts. Conclusion: Our experiences show that field studies are an efficient teaching method. Its most important outcome is sensitizing medical students towards health related social problems and helping them to understand and handle such problems. -
Debunking Myths about the American Presidential Elections of 2016 and Failures in the Social Sciences
51-61Views:10Throughout the campaign and following the elections of 2016, the two major political parties
cherished stories about what happened, and why it happened. Some of these stories have some
basis in fact, while others are completely mythical, and nevertheless believed. These stories, or
myths, arise from the political desires and belief systems of those who tell them. In what follows
we will examine these stories in the lights of the facts -
Limits of the relationships in the roma communities living on the margins of society in Budapest
97-120.Views:10In this essay, I aim to summarize the main characteristics of the relationship structure of
poor Roma families in Budapest. The generational changes in the relationship structure are
illustrated by interviews and a short review of the relevant literature. In my research, I try to
find the answer to the question, whetherthe examined segregated streets and apartment blocks
– individually or collectively – can be called a community. And also if these segregated areas
have a describable connection limit, if we can describe them in a geographical or social sense,
or ifthese relationship have ethnical boundaries. I recorded my semi-structured interviews in
the 8th and 9th district of Budapest in 2017. I interviewed twenty people from ages of sixteen to
fifty-five. All parts of the interviews are accompanied by the related analytical and explanatory
notes. -
Drawn Commuters: Caricature as a visual historical resource
125-150Views:28Despite of the fact that during the time of state socialism commuters meant a continuously
growing social group both in proportion and in size, writing about their social history has
been pushed into the background so far. The author’s aim is to fill this gap by trying to discover
the most of the available sources of different genres. The present study shows part of this
larger volume work, it shows what it can add to our knowledge about a social group through
traditional sources if we include caricatures of a given social group as visual historical sources
in the analysis.
In this paper, the author analyses sixteen caricatures of commuters, published in “Ludas
Matyi,” comparing written and audio visual sources. In the study, she tries, among other things,
to find out if there was a definite commuter picture of “Ludas Matyi”, and if so, to what extent
did this commuter’s image differ from that of other products in the press? To what extent did the
satirical portrayal of commuters refer to long-distance commuters and to what extent to daily
commuters? Were the real anomalies of commuting in the era reflected in Ludas Matyi?
The analysis discusses the economic and social processes that characterize the time of
publishing the caricatures, and denominates the external and internal characteristics and
emotions commuters were endowed with.The aim of the author is to present the method of
caricature analysis, which emphasizes the comparability of resources. -
In the thick of relationships? Personal and distance relationships with relatives and friends in Hungary in 2015
65-101Views:37The study presents the structure and intensity of the relationships of the Hungarian population over 16 years of age through a descriptive analysis of four variables measuring the frequency of personal and distance contact with relatives and friends from the EU-SILC 2015 survey. According to the data, the relationship structure is on average balanced, half of the relationships are related to relatives or friends, and the relative proportions of personal and long-distance relationships are similar. According to our results, in addition to age, the financial situation of the household has a significant correlation with the characteristics of the relationship structure. One of the lessons of multivariate regression models is that the effect of other background variables on the relationship structure intensifies in parallel with aging, leading to a deepening of relationship inequalities among the elderly. Another lesson of the models is that the inclusion of household characteristics (financial situation, number of household members, material transfer relationship with other households) has a significant effect on the mechanism of individual background variables, thus confirming that a deeper study of relationship intensity and relationship structure within the household is essential. At the end of our analysis, we compiled clusters based on the intensity of relationships, the direction of relationships, and the channel of contacting, with a relative majority of more than one-third of the respondents with extremely weak relationship embeddedness.
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Territorial integration and development policy. : The case of Vértes Nature Park
41-63.Views:20The paper seeks to understand the influences of development policy initiatives on territorial in-tegration. Through the analysis of Vértes Nature Park case study we aimed at exploring whether the territorial relationships of the stakeholders can be restructured by spatially based develop-ment. The aim of the paper is to present the mechanisms of territorial integration by a case study analysis of rural territorial development.Our findings show that the participation and involvement of stakeholders in rural develop-ment are determined by their role and status in the initiative, thus the initiator actors are the more active ones. The territorial relationships of stakeholders are increased and strengthened by the level of involvement in the activities of Vértes Nature Park. Nevertheless, the territorial closeness also affects the stakeholders’ involvement. Csákvár and its surroundings have central position in this territorial relationship. The acceptance of the principals of the initiatives is also affected by the territorial closeness and it limits the contested development initiatives.
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Changes in reproductive policies in Hungary between 2010 and 2022
32-57Views:127This paper examines Hungarian reproductive policies, their changes and their restrictions in relation to pronatalist objectives between 2010 and 2022. The aim of the study is to present and interpret legislative changes in reproductive policies in the context of the pronatalist policies in Hungary. Reproductive policies include the regulation of assisted reproductive technologies, adoption, abortion, contraception, and sex education. In the development of these policies, we assume that a fundamentally pronatalist approach prevails, but we also identify various specific related constraints: heteronormativity, marriage-centredness, and the maintenance and reinforcement of traditional gender roles. We assume that Hungary’s reproductive policies have become increasingly selective since 2010 after the second Orbán government. These policies can be considered selective because they do not encourage all social groups to have children. These result in the exclusion of for example socially disadvantaged groups, single people and same-sex couples from reproduction due to legal constraints, a lack of financial support, access, and transfer of information. In conclusion, selective, heteronormative and marriage-based pronatalism is most identifiable in the adoption context, but abortion regulation, the legal environment for assisted reproductive technologies and sex education, in general, may reinforce pronatalist objectives.
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The challenges of supervised machine learning in sociological applications
27-42.Views:12The sociological applications of supervised machine learning, already well proven in industrial/
business applications, raise specific questions. The reason for this specificity is that in these applications, the algorithm is tasked with learning complex concepts (e.g. whether a tweet contains hate speech). Supervised learning consists of learning to classify previously annotated (hate
speech/non-hate speech) texts by the algorithm, looking for characteristic text patterns. The
questions that arise are: how to prepare annotation? How can a hermeneutic challenge such as
hate speech recognition be performed by annotators? Are routinely applied, detailed annotation
guidelines helpful? The article also discusses how large companies perform coding on crowdsourcing platforms, and describes AI bias, which in this case means that annotators themselves
introduce bias into the data. I illustrate these issues with our own research experiences.
