ICAR Research Data Repository for Knowledge Management

As part of the project "Social Stratification in Eastern Europe after 1989," sample surveys were conducted in 1993 and 1994 in six countries: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Slovakia. Using a questionnaire common to all countries, national probability samples of approximately 5,000 members of the adult population were surveyed in five of the six countries in 1993; in Poland, due to the lack of local funds, the data collection was delayed until 1994 and the sample size was reduced to approximately 3,500. To permit analyses of special interest to urban geographers (the Dutch funding was provided by a study committee of the Dutch NSF consisting of sociologists and urban geographers), over-samples of the populations of Prague and Warsaw were surveyed, with the sample sizes sufficient to bring the sum of cases from the over-sample and the national sample in each country to approximately 1,500. (About 900 cases each are available for Budapest and Sofia, generated by the national sample design. Thus, a four city comparison of Eastern European capitals is feasible.) The design of the survey called for exactly comparable wording of questions, and variation in the response categories only where national variations in circumstances (e.g., different religious distributions) warranted it. Country teams were free to add local questions at the end of the questionnaire. To ensure such comparability, the questionnaire was translated into each local language and then back-translated into English; the back-translated versions were compared as a group by a multi-lingual team and discrepancies in wording corrected. Inevitably, despite our best intentions, minor variations crept into the questionnaire. These are identified at appropriate places in the Codebook. The local language questionnaires are shown in Appendix G (Vol. II). (Probability samples of about 1,000 members of the old elite and about 1,000 members of the new elite in each country except Slovakia were also surveyed, using a similar but not identical questionnaire. These surveys have a separate codebook, which may be found under the title "Social Stratification in Eastern Europe after 1989: Elite Survey".)