Cílem článku je podat přehled o problematice archivace sociologických dat. Článek se zabývá archivací z několika úhlů pohledu. Rozebírá její význam pro vědeckou práci a místo archivů v „cyklu oběhu dat“. Následně se věnuje přípravě dat pro archivaci – nárokům, které z toho plynou jak pro výzkumníky, tak i pro pracovníky archivů. V další části je rozebrán standard DDI jakožto nástroj vhodný pro popis (nejen) sociologických dat.
This study introduces the concept of political disaffection, its measurement and operationalisation. Theoretically, this article builds on a differentiation between four basic types of orientations towards a political regime and its institutions: legitimacy of the regime, institutional disaffection, individual disaffection, and political dissatisfaction. Political disaffection is composed of two dimensions: institutional disaffection refers to beliefs that political institutions are not responsive to the requirements of the people; and individual disaffection reflects citizens‘ perceptions that they are able and willing to participation in politics. Principal axis factoring, reliability analysis along with internal and external validity analysis are used to examine institutional and individual disaffection using the Czech waves within ISSP (1996, 2000, 2004 and 2006). The results indicate that items used for measuring institutional and individual disaffection do measure the two concepts of interest. Moreover, repeated measurement of political disaffection and the stability of the results obtained provide strong arguments for the usage of these measures in future surveys.
The paper deals with powerlessness as one of the possible meanings of alienation, and presents Neal’s Powerlessness Scale as a means for measuring this concept. The aim of this research is to find out if it is possible to adopt the Neal’s research technique, developed in the context of the American culture in the late 1950s, to empirical sociological research in the Czech Republic. This issue is important because there is at present no standard attitudinal instrument for measuring a persons’ perception of their power to exert influence over socio-political events. An initial test of the reliability and internal and external validity of Neal’s scale is undertaken using a non-representative sample of the Czech population. Results of this quantitative analysis suggest that a subset of nine items from the original twelve item scale is the most reliable and valid measure of a person’s sense of control over the socio-political events within the Czech cultural milieu. Importantly, the process of data collection reveals several problematic features of Neal’s powerlessness scale, and it is recommended that certain alterations before its further use in the Czech context.
This article examines the reliability of statistical models that use visualization of word distances using computer-assisted text analysis. This study looks at the choice of parameters in the COOA - software for word co-occurrence analysis. The word co-occurrence analysis enables visualization of text structure through the exploration of the number of co-occurrences of words. The data visualization provided by a multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) procedure is susceptible to a particular form of error. The nonlinear relationship between words with significantly different frequencies lies at the root of this problem where words with higher frequencies are placed in the middle of a two-dimensional MDS map visualization. Words with lower frequency, on the other hand, are forced by the MDS estimator to the edge of the two-dimensional map and their estimated spatial positions are unstable. These two processes are potentially a major source of error in making inferences. One solution for reducing this source of error is to (a) reduce the number of words in a model or (b) increase of the number of model dimensions. This article, however, suggests that a detailed investigation of the word structure and a thorough analysis of the error sources and their meaningful interpretation may be a better solution.