Comparative Sociological Research

International large-scale assessments and comparisons (ILSAs) in education have become significant policy phenomena. How a country fares in these assessments has come to signify not only how a nation’s education system is performing, but also its future prospects in a global economic ‘race’. These assessments provoke
passionate arguments at specialist conferences and in scholarly journals and they are just as passionately debated in the media. Within academe, ILSAs are researched by sociologists and psychometricians, policy experts and statisticians. This multidisciplinary, multi-voice discussion has not always served to highlight the complexity of the issues involved. Instead, discussions across various groups of actors have often led to a polarisation of views and a hardening of stances. Large-scale comparisons have deeply divided academic opinion with regard to their validity, usefulness and use. The divergence in ontological commitments, methodologies
and paradigms of research makes discussions among one
set of scholars almost incomprehensible to another. New theories, concepts and vocabularies are urgently required to engage productively with this important phenomenon. Borrowing concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the history and sociology of numbers, I argue that understanding such comparative exercises as socio-technical assemblages would move the critique of large-scale comparisons in education in more productive
directions.

The problem of political culture and the closely related problem of political socialization as a process by which political culture is formed, maintained and changed, play a particularly important role in the course of the transition from a communist regime to a democracy. In these countries the question is not so much one of the maintenance of the existing political system, but of a transition from one system (the communist) to another (the democratic) and of the gradual rooting and consolidation of a new regime. This special situation presents an extraordinarily interesting subject for research. Many non-traditional questions and problems are emerging. For example, politically conservative attitudes tend to increase with age, but what happens in a country where, on the contrary, conservatism represents something new, which is succeeding the forced rule of a "progressive" party and 
ideology? In addition, the division of the Czechoslovak federation into two independent states has given an increased importance to political apprentissage and the adoption of patriotic symbols strengthening ties to the national community. How do the young Czech people of today see their Slovak contemporaries, who have become "foreigners" overnight?
The project, the results of which are summarized in this report, was conceived as a comparative study. The basic subject of research activity was young people aged 14-18 in middle schools or training centres and apprenticeships.
A systematic proportional selection of middle-school students and apprentices undertaken right across the territory of the Czech Republic has allowed us to interpret the results as representative for youth as a whole. Nevertheless, we always draw attention to any significant differences between the middle-school and apprenticeship groups. The generation of the parents of the young people questioned, i.e. people currently in their forties, has provided a group that on the one hand allows for a degree of inter-generational comparison, and on the other assists the investigation of the transmission of values and the way in which the political attitudes of the young generation are moulded. The research has focused on three forms of perception of political reality: knowledge, values, and attitudes, as defined on various levels.
A number of specialists have rightly drawn attention to the important role played by the first confrontation between the idealized values learnt within the family and schools, and the values discovered to be, as it were, really operating in social and political life. The recent conflict between school and family under the former regime (which we shall be discussing further), like the later period of political transition to democracy, has on the one hand complicated the situation for the younger generation, but on the other has stimulated young people to a more active and critical approach.
In the context of the research project we have sought to determine the relations between the emergent value structures of young people and their political attitudes. For respondents less than 16 years old, however, it was not appropriate to use only standardised questionnaire methods. We therefore also employed the method of verbal associations based 
on a list of key terms in the questionnaire.

... juxtapositions of epistemic and material violence in transnational migration and domestic violence research 42 ERICA BURMAN Reflections on ... 10 The return of the repressed 159 LOIC WACQUANT Reflections on Wacquant's chapter 170 Methodological discussion section iii ...

The present issue of the Working Papers (No 3, 2009) published by the Department of Sociology of the Institute for Eastern European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin contains preliminary results of the international research project Comparing Out-Migration from Armenia and Georgia (ArGeMi), funded by Volkswagen-Stiftung for the 2008-2010
period.

Two introductory chapters provide an overview on the topic of international migration and on the aims of the research project. Three reports explore causes, processes and effects
of out-migration from Armenia and Georgia to Moscow which is the most relevant destination of migrants from the South Caucasus. The issue also contains a comprehensive bibliography on out-migration from Armenia and Georgia and
immigration to Russia.

The guiding idea of the descriptions and explanations is the necessity to analyze international migration from the perspective of both the countries of origin and the countries of immigration. This balanced approach is further elaborated by taking into account the variety of macro-, meso-, and micro-social determinants of international migration and its consequences. This two-tired explanatory model offers fresh
insights into the interplay of economic, political and cultural factors and effects of migration. In addition, it makes it possible to systematically study acting individuals together with economic organizations, political institutions and other
collective actors involved in the international migration.

Garland, C. (forthcoming, 2014) ‘As Barriers Fall, Contingency Becomes Possibility: Protest Resisting and Escaping Containment and Categorization’, Part II Identity, Embodiment and Categorisation in Eds. Lamond, I. and Spracklen, K. 'Protests as Events: Politics, Activism and Leisure (London: Rowman & Littlefield International) Hardback ISBN/9781783480760 Paperback ISBN/978-1-78348-077-7 eBook ISBN/978-1-78348-078-4 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783480760

The paper investigates how gender exerts its influence on contemporary adolescents with respect to their access to the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The focus here is on the so-called usage access. The paper's empirical basis is that of information on the ICTs usage collected for 39 countries in the framework of the 2006 wave of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study. Ordinal regression modelling is used as a method for data investigation. The analysis points to the persistence of gender inequality seemingly in favour of boys. In all countries under investigation, boys report using computers and the Internet for educational purposes more often than girls. Controlling for the 2006 value of the national GDP per capita, the level of a country's gender inequality measured by the Gender Gap Index does not have any statistically significant effect on gender gap in educational use of ICTs. A sign of the gender coefficient suggest, however, that the increase in society's gender-neutrality is associated with the increase in boys' advantage over girls as regards the frequency of ICT/Internet educational use. The possibility that this advantage of boys is in fact a sign of their educational underperformance is discussed. Another possibility is also discussed, namely, that girls' decreased (in comparison with boys) frequency of using computers and the Internet for playing computer games might, counterintuitively, be the source of girls' disadvantage in the future.

P.S. If you do not have an institutional subscription to this journal, please drop me a line at tomasz.drabowicz@eui.eu or tomasz.drabowicz@uni.lodz.pl.