Program In Comparative International Development Department of Sociology Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD. 21218 USA Working Paper #6 SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND PERSONALITY UNDER CONDITIONS OF RADICAL SOCIAL CHANGE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF POLAND AND UKRAINE Melvin L. Kohn Kazimierz M. Slomczynski Krystyna Janicka Valery Khmelko Bogdan W. Mach Vladimir Paniotto Wojciech Zaborowski INTRODUCTION This paper presents a theoretical approach to the study of the effects of social change on personality and proposes a research strategy. We are implementing this strategy in a comparative study of Poland and Ukraine. Our project addresses a central theoretical problem in the relationship between social structure and personality: ascertaining the processes by which position in the structure of the society, in particular, the class structure and the system of social stratification, affects individual psychological functioning and behavior. Most past research addressed to this problem, including all of our own, has been done under relatively stable social conditions. In sharp contrast, this project is designed to study how radical social change might affect the relationships between social structure and personality. Do generalizations and interpretations that have been developed from studies conducted under conditions of relative stability apply under conditions of radical social change? If so, this would greatly increase the power of those interpretations. If not, how must past interpretations be modified, either in terms of delimiting the conditions under which they apply (their scope conditions) or in terms of respecifying the mechanisms through which social structure affects individual psychological functioning? More specifically, our project is designed to test and to refine a general interpretation of the relationships between social structure and personality: that social-structural position affects individual psychological functioning principally through its profound effects on people's immediately impinging conditions of life, occupational conditions in particular. This interpretation has been developed and elaborated on the basis of cross-national research conducted in a Western capitalist society (the United States), a Western socialist society (Poland, in the late 1970's), and a non-Western capitalist society (Japan)--all studied under conditions of relative social stability. The new research is being conducted in two societies presently undergoing radical social change--Poland and Ukraine. This objective of the research is comparative: Poland and Ukraine are chosen for study, not for their own sakes, but because they are strategic choices for the comparative study of social change and its psychological consequences. A second major objective of the research is to study Poland and Ukraine for their own sakes, or--to put the matter more generally--because we are interested not only in social change as it might occur anywhere in the world, but also in the particular social changes that are now occurring in the transformation of Eastern Europe. The research is designed to gain basic knowledge about the transformation of Poland and Ukraine from socialist to post-socialist economies. Our intent is to document and interpret the social changes that are occurring in these countries and to trace the consequences of these changes for the lives of the people of these countries. The research is focused on obtaining a fundamental understanding of the very processes of social change, including the psychological consequences of such change, that are essential to an understanding of what is happening to those two countries --and to all the countries of Eastern Europe--today. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND In collaboration with Carmi Schooler, Atsushi Naoi, and other U.S., Polish, and Japanese colleagues, Kohn and Slomczynski have for several years been investigating the relationships between social structure and personality in industrialized societies. The main theme of their findings and interpretation is that position in the social structure--in particular, in the class structure and the social- stratification hierarchy--has profound effects on personality. These effects result primarily from social-structural position greatly affecting more proximate conditions of life, job conditions in particular, especially those job conditions determinative of one's opportunities to exercise self- direction in work; these job conditions, in turn, profoundly affect personality. A more advantageous class position, or a higher position in the stratification order, affords greater opportunity to be self-directed in one's work, that is, to work at jobs that are substantively complex, that are not subject to close supervision, and are not routinized. The experience of occupational self-direction, in turn, leads to a higher valuation of self-direction for oneself and for one's children, to greater intellectual flexibility, and to a more self-directed orientation to self and society (Kohn 1969; Kohn and Schooler 1983, particularly chapters 5-7). Being self-directed in one's work even leads to making more intellectually demanding use of one's leisure time (K. Miller and Kohn 1983). The psychological effects of occupational self-direction are as great for older workers as for younger and middle-aged workers (J. Miller, Slomczynski, and Kohn 1985). And these effects even extend inter-generationally: parents' occupational self-direction affects their own values; their values in turn decidedly affect their children's values (Kohn, Slomczynski, and Schoenbach 1986; Kohn and Slomczynski 1990, chapter 7). Moreover, self-direction in realms other than paid employment--in particular, in housework (Schooler et al. 1983) and in schoolwork (K. Miller, Kohn, and Schooler 1985, 1986)-- has psychological effects very much like those of self- direction in paid employment. The experience of self-direction is of pervasive importance for linking social-structural position to psychological functioning. Many of these findings were initially derived from analyses of cross-sectional surveys conducted in the United States, the principal survey having been conducted by Kohn and Schooler in 1964 (see Kohn 1969; Kohn and Schooler 1983). A ten-year follow-up study made possible longitudinal analyses to assess the directions of effects in the relationships between job conditions and personality. These analyses showed the relationships to be quintessentially reciprocal--with job decidedly affecting personality, but with personality also decidedly affecting conditions of work (Kohn and Schooler 1983, chapters 5-7). The effects of job on personality appear to be ongoing and continuous, those of personality on job rather slower. Since all these analyses suggest that the principal psychological process by which job affects personality is one of learning-generalization--that is, of learning from the job and applying those lessons to non- occupational social reality--this implies that both learning and generalization may be quickly responsive to changed conditions of work. There have been many replications of this research, both in the United States and in several other industrialized societies, the findings of all of these studies generally consonant with those of the original U.S. studies (see the review in Kohn and Slomczynski 1990, chapter 9). The most systematic replications, and the most rigorous cross-national assessments of the interpretation, have been done in comparative studies carried out by Kazimierz Slomczynski and his associates in Poland in 1978 and by Atsushi Naoi and his associates in Japan in 1979. The intent of these studies was to determine whether the findings and interpretation developed from the U.S. studies apply as well to an "actually existing socialist society," as Poland then was (see Slomczynski et al. 1981; Kohn et al. 1990; and Kohn and Slomczynski 1990) and to a non-Western capitalist society (see Naoi and Schooler 1985; Schooler and Naoi 1988; and Kohn et al. 1990). We do not mean to imply that the United States in the 1960's and 1970's, and Japan in the 1970's, were exemplary of some ideal type of capitalist society, nor that in 1978 Poland was exemplary of some ideal type of socialist society (to the contrary: see Wesolowski 1988). Whether the United States and Japan really were capitalist at those times, or some hybrid of capitalism and welfare statism, or whether Poland in 1978 really was socialist or state capitalist or some hybrid of socialism and capitalism, is immaterial. The United States and Japan were different from Poland in the crucial respect of how their economies were organized--the United States and Japan having economies in which market forces predominated, Poland having a centrally planned and administered economy. In most respects, the findings for Poland and Japan are entirely consistent with those for the United States and support the interpretations that Kohn and Schooler (1983) had drawn from the U.S. data: social-structural position greatly affects opportunities, even the necessity, for occupational self-direction; the exercise of self-direction in work, in turn, increases intellectual flexibility, promotes the valuation of self-direction (in contrast to conformity to external authority) by parents for their children, and facilitates a self-directed orientation to self and others (see Kohn 1987; Kohn et al. 1990). In short, social-structural position has generally similar psychological effects in both capitalist and socialist societies and in both Western and non-Western capitalist societies. Moreover, and much more important, social-structural position has generally similar effects for essentially the same reason: because position in the larger social structure profoundly affects people's immediately impinging conditions of life--their job conditions in particular--that affect their values, orientations, and cognitive functioning. There are, of course, some important cross-national differences as well. The most striking cross-national difference is in the relationships between social-structural position and a sense of distress, in contrast to a sense of well-being. In the United States, managers have a strong sense of well-being and manual workers are the most distressed; in Poland, nearly the opposite; and in Japan managers have a strong sense of well-being, but it is the nonmanual workers, not the manual workers, who are most distressed. Similarly, in the United States, the correlation between social stratification and distress is negative, in Poland it is positive, and in Japan it is virtually nil. Part of the explanation for these cross-national differences is that occupational self-direction does not have the cross-nationally consistent impact on distress that it has on other facets of psychological functioning. A more fundamental reason why the relationships between social-structural position and distress are cross-nationally inconsistent, though, is that job conditions other than those directly involved in occupational self-direction, such as job risks and uncertainties and protections from those risks and uncertainties, have effects countervailing to those of occupational self-direction (Kohn et al. 1990, Kohn and Slomczynski 1990, chapter 8). Thus, the cross-national analyses confirm the generality of the U.S.-based interpretation of the relationships of social structure with parental valuation of self-direction and with such important facets of personality as self-directedness of orientation and intellectual flexibility. But these analyses also teach us that a full understanding of the relationship between social structure and distress requires that we enlarge our interpretation to take account of job conditions other than those directly involved in occupational self-direction. A NEW THEORETICAL CONTEXT: RADICAL SOCIAL CHANGE All these findings, and our entire understanding of social structure and personality, are based on studies conducted under relatively stable social conditions. This is true even for the Polish survey, which was carried out more than a year before the advent of Solidarnosc, before there were any decided signs of impending change. The obvious and important question is whether the findings and interpretation apply also in times of radical social change. In posing this question, we distinguish between three general situations: in the first, social structure is relatively stable; in the second, radical change is in process of occurring; in the third, some transformation of social structure has occurred and conditions are again relatively stable, albeit different from what they were before. Our past research has focused on the first general situation, showing the relationships of social structure and personality to be markedly similar regardless of whether the society is capitalist or socialist, Western or non-Western--provided that social conditions are stable. Our present research, which focuses on the second situation, questions whether those largely consistent relationships obtain during transitional periods of radical social change. We are not now proposing to study the third general situation, of transformed social structures, because that situation probably lies too far in the future. There are three closely related issues in the study of social change as that change affects the relationships between social structure and personality: change in social structure per se, change in the relationships between social structure and personality, and across-the-board personality change. We must necessarily be concerned with all of them. In examining the effects of social change on personality, though, the crucial question must be: What consequences will radical social change have for the relationships between social structure and personality, particularly during transitional periods? The very idea of there being a relationship between social structure and personality implies a dynamic interchange. What we learn about this interchange at times of social stability is a static slice of a dynamic process. Whether what we thereby learn is typical of the more general process, or specific to times of social stability, is at present an open question. The null hypothesis, so to speak, of the planned research is that our general interpretation of the relationships between social structure and personality will prove to be valid even during periods of radical social change. Contrary hypotheses would predict that there are several ways that radical social change might obliterate, or at any rate greatly modify, the relationships between social structure and personality that we have heretofore found: 1. The class and stratification systems of the countries of Eastern Europe are themselves in process of change. It is an open question as to whether the class structures and the systems of social stratification of these societies will be as completely transformed as their political and economic structures. (After all, our own research and that of many other investigators have shown the class and stratification systems of the two Eastern European countries that have been intensively studied--Poland and Hungary--to be not so very different from those of capitalist societies.) Nevertheless, there is every reason to expect that with marketization and privatization these systems will be substantially reshaped. For example, in Poland there is almost certain to be a considerable expansion and internal diversification of the class of small- to medium-sized employers; in the former Soviet Union, where there has been no such class, it is now beginning to emerge (sometimes in the form of so-called "cooperatives"). Almost certainly, everywhere in Eastern Europe the stratification hierarchies will become steeper: inequality will increase. And, of course, with the Communist Party no longer a dominant power, other sources of political power will assume a more important role in shaping the social structure. These and other changes in the class structure and stratification system may be expected to result in corresponding changes in the relationships of these very facets of social structure with personality. 2. In all our studies, the invariant relationship has been between social-structural position and occupational self- direction, a relationship that transcends differences between capitalist and socialist, Western and non-Western societies. (Such cross-national differences as we have found are entirely at the next linkage, that between occupational self-direction and psychological functioning.) It is certainly a plausible hypothesis, though, that the relationship between social- structural position and occupational self-direction may be weakened during periods of transformation from one system to another, when the occupational structure is itself in flux. While we cannot predict the final outcome, it is already clear that as massive state-run, highly bureaucratized enterprises are dismantled, fewer people will be employed in such enterprises and more people will be employed as entrepreneurs or as employees in small enterprises and in the secondary and informal economies. Many other changes are likely to be introduced in working conditions, including those attendant on the introduction of new technologies --which, as the history of the United States and of Western Europe has shown (Form 1987, Spenner 1983), can have both positive and negative, often unpredictable, implications for workers' opportunities for self-direction in their work. The obvious hypothesis is that the heretofore-invariant relationship between social- structural position and opportunities for occupational self- direction may be weakened or may even disappear under such conditions. 3. The pivotal role of occupational self-direction as an explanatory link between social-structural position and personality may well be challenged under the conditions of change and uncertainty presently being experienced in Eastern Europe. First of all, job conditions other than those directly involved in occupational self-direction, or conditions of life other than the occupational, may come much more to the fore under such conditions. It is certainly a plausible extrapolation from our past findings vis-a-vis distress that conditions of uncertainty--and not only job uncertainty--will have powerful psychological effects. It is a reasonable hypothesis as well that non-job conditions of life may play an important bridging role between social-structural position and psychological functioning during a period when occupational conditions are in flux. Church, political organizations, neighborhood, family, friendship networks, and even voluntary organizations may come to play a more important role in shaping, or buffering, the proximate experiences that link position in the social structure to individual psychological functioning. Finally, current conditions of life may play a less crucial role, and people's expectations about their future prospects a more important role, under conditions of radical social change. 4. There is also the distinct possibility that the experience of radical social change will itself have such great across-the-board psychological consequences as to overwhelm all else. We certainly do expect that the uncertainties attendant on radical social change will increase distress. There is reason to expect, as well, that anything that increases distress will also affect the relationships between social-structural position and other facets of psychological functioning. All the relationships we have studied--those between social-structural position and occupational self-direction; those between occupational self- direction and psychological functioning; and--what may be most pertinent here--those between the several different dimensions of psychological functioning--are reciprocal. In their analyses of U.S. data, Kohn and Schooler (1983, chapter 6) found, for example, that distress has a dampening effect on self-directedness of orientation, thus also on intellectual flexibility and on occupational self-direction. Might the distress-inducing conditions of life now being experienced in Eastern Europe short-circuit the processes by which advantaged position facilitates a self-directed orientation and intellectual flexibility in more stable times? 5. Finally, even if the interpretation we have drawn from our past research should prove to be generally applicable to the changing circumstances of life in Eastern Europe, in many particulars our map of the actual empirical relationships will have to be modified. To take only one striking example: Kohn and Slomczynski (1990, table 8.3, p. 222) found that in 1978 Polish managers who did not belong to the Polish United Workers (Communist) Party were exceptional in their degree of distress--they were much more distressed than managers who did belong to the Party and also more distressed than members of any other social class. That particular finding cannot be replicated in a Poland where the Party no longer exists. But our more general interpretation--that the non-Party managers were so distressed because their positions entailed uncertainties, risks, and insecurities greater than those experienced by managers who were members of the Party and greater than those experienced by managers in the less centralized systems of the capitalist countries--can be tested by looking for sources of job insecurities, and job support, in the modified occupational structure of post-socialist Poland. More than that, the changes currently being experienced in Eastern Europe provide an exceptional opportunity for increasing our understanding of the relationships between social-structurally based uncertainties and the sense of distress. RESEARCH STRATEGY How do we learn more about the effects of radical social change on the relationships between social structure and personality? Certainly not by further study of the United States or of Japan, not at this particular time. Poland is experiencing radical social change, and for our purposes a restudy of Poland is strategically central. The former Soviet Union comes into play for much the same reason we and our collaborators originally studied Poland and Japan: to differentiate social-structural universals from single-nation particularities (see the discussions of strategies of cross- national research in Kohn 1987 and in Kohn 1989b). A comparative study of Poland and the former Soviet Union would provide an opportunity to study the effects of social change under contrasting conditions. The political conditions of the two are of course quite different; Poland is also much further along in the transition from a socialist to some form of post- socialist economy; and we can foresee the eventual outcome of the process with somewhat greater assurance for Poland than for any of the Republics of the former Soviet Union. Poland evidently is moving toward some form of market economy, the Parliament having long since passed the necessary enabling legislation and the populace being generally, albeit with growing reservations, in favor of such a transformation. For the Republics of the former Soviet Union, there is considerably greater uncertainty about what form their economies will eventually take. The former Soviet Union as an entirety, however, is too ethnically and linguistically heterogenous, and too complex politically, for our purposes; a study of one of the larger Republics is both more feasible and more strategic. Ukraine is particularly well suited for comparison to Poland, because (in comparison to the other Republics) its culture is relatively similar to Poland's. By comparing Poland to Ukraine, we can compare two societies that differ less in culture than in political and economic context. This should make it much more possible to interpret whatever differences we may find than if we compared societies that differed both in culture and in social-structural context. Our research is thus comparative in three distinct ways: [1] It is comparative over time, in that it compares Poland today, under conditions of radical social change, to the Poland of 1978, a time of relative stability. [2] It compares Poland to Ukraine, a Republic of rather similar culture that is also undergoing radical social change but under rather different political and economic circumstances. And [3] it compares both Poland and Ukraine to the United States and Japan, two relatively stable capitalist societies. RESEARCH DESIGN Cross-sectional surveys. Since our primary comparisons will be of social (rather than of individual) change, it is more important that we secure data from samples that are currently representative of the populations of Poland and Ukraine in than that we secure longitudinal data. (The question is of course moot for Ukraine, for there was no earlier survey directly pertinent to our current interests.) We are therefore conducting new, cross-sectional surveys of Poland and Ukraine. The 1978 Polish survey was based on a sample representative of all men living in urban areas and employed in civilian occupations. A year and a half after the survey of men, we interviewed a representative subsample of their wives and children. In the new surveys, we are again--reluctantly-- limiting our samples to urban areas. We are expanding the scope of our samples, however, to be representative of all adults living in urban areas, women as well as men, and whether or not employed, while again intending to interview the spouse and one selected child of all respondents who have one or more children in the age-range, 13-17. In the changing conditions that Poland and Ukraine are currently experiencing, it is essential that we expand the definition of the pertinent population to include not only employed men and women, but also men and women who are not currently employed. In the process of radical social change, the not currently employed may be the most decidedly, very likely the most adversely, affected. This seems almost self- evidently likely to be the case for the unemployed, both for those unemployed who are actively seeking new employment and for those who may be too discouraged to do so. Another group who may be decidedly affected by social change are the members of a growing social category (in Poland, but not yet in Ukraine) of women who decided to be housewives, either because they lost their jobs and could not find new employment, or because they could no longer afford to be employed, as a result of the dismantling of state child-care and other facilities. Yet another group are those retired despite not yet reaching the mandatory retirement age, because of a shortage of work. The study of social structure and personality can no longer be limited to the employed populace. Since the non-employed represent segments of the population who may be particularly affected by ongoing social change, we have developed a multi-tracked interview schedule, with special batteries of questions designed for the currently employed (differentiating between employees and the self- employed), the unemployed, students, housewives, retirees, and the disabled. In all of these tracks, the questions attempt to assess the respondents' activities, particularly in terms of the substantive complexity of those activities and the degree of self-direction they entail. In the battery of questions for the unemployed, for example, we focus on their job-seeking activities. In the battery of questions for housewives, we focus on the substantive complexity of their housework. Follow-up survey (Poland). So that we could also do longitudinal analyses, we had originally intended to do a follow-up survey of a subsample of 500 of the men in the original Polish study. To our dismay, though, the list of respondents in that study was destroyed during the period of martial law, in what in retrospect appears to have been an excess of well-intentioned zeal. However, one especially valuable set of records was preserved--the names and addresses of all those men in the original sample who had one or more children in the age-range 13-17. For every respondent on that list, his wife and one child, randomly selected from within that age-range, had been interviewed in a study of the transmission of values in the family conducted about a year and a half after the main survey. In addition to the men's names and 1978 addresses, the list includes the sex and year of birth of the child who had been interviewed. Having this information, it should be possible to locate in 1992 all three members of the family triads interviewed in 1978-80. The N for the intended follow-up study is small--177 triads were interviewed in the baseline surveys--but the data are essential for our research strategy. We intend to do follow-up interviews with all three members of these triads, with three major objectives in mind. First, it will be exceedingly valuable to do true longitudinal analyses, even with a small N. That we can do such analyses not only for men, but also for women (admittedly, a sample limited to wives) and for a younger generation (the offspring now being approximately 25-29 years old), is a net plus. Second, these analyses will provide useful information for the simulated longitudinal analyses (to be described below) that we intend to do with the cross-sectional data that we shall be collecting for much larger samples of Polish and Ukrainian men and women. Third, there is considerable intellectual interest in pursuing the issues of the intergenerational transmission of values--a long-standing concern of ours (Kohn, 1983; Kohn, Slomczynski, and Schoenbach 1986)--under conditions of radical social change. A particular interest here is the study of political socialization under newly emerging political conditions. DOMAINS OF INQUIRY As in the original U.S., Polish, and Japanese studies, the major domains about which we are inquiring are social- structural position, other social characteristics, job conditions, and four principal dimensions of psychological functioning: values, intellectual flexibility, self- directedness of orientation, and a sense of well-being or distress. Most of the questions used in the Polish and Japanese surveys were taken from the original U.S. survey (for the complete interview schedule, see Appendix C of Kohn 1969), albeit with important additions by the Polish and Japanese investigators--for example, the question about membership in the Polish United Workers Party that has proved so important for our understanding of the relationship between social structure and distress. For the present inquiry, we have also developed many new questions, to be used in both the Polish and the Ukrainian surveys. The most important of these questions concern the changing conditions now being experienced, or likely to be experienced, by the populations of Poland and Ukraine. We have also developed more refined questions about the changing social structures of Poland and Ukraine. And we are attempting to rectify some of the lacks in the questions asked in our past studies. The new questions fall into five (more or less arbitrarily differentiated) categories: 1. Questions pertinent to the changing conditions now being experienced, or likely to be experienced, or hoped for or feared, by the populations of Poland and Ukraine. Some of these have to do with occupational structure and conditions of employ: ownership and other forms of control over resources and labor power; changes in the organizational structure of places of employ; the changing nature of unions and of workers' relationships with their unions; changes in the bases on which people are paid; technological developments. Many have to do with risks and uncertainties and job protections-- both the reality (including the structural bases of the uncertainties and protections) and perceptions thereof. The risk of unemployment, of course, looms especially large. 2. The Polish members of the research team--who have since 1987 been studying the changing social structure of Poland--have developed and tested a number of questions directly pertinent to our present purposes. Some of these are refinements of our conceptualization and indexing of both social class and social stratification: For measuring social class more precisely, they have developed questions that make distinctions among different types of managers, that differentiate the segments of the private sector of the economy, and that distinguish two distinct types of non- supervisory, nonmanual workers (on the basis of their educational qualifications and personal characteristics). For measuring social stratification more precisely, they have developed questions that make much finer distinctions in both level of educational attainment and types of educational institutions, and among sources of income. They have also developed new questions about anticipated career prospects, as well as questions about organizational involvements (particularly in local community organizations), religious beliefs and participation in religious institutions, and beliefs about egalitarianism--all of these matters that are coming more and more to the fore as Poland (and Ukraine) experience social change and all of which may be pertinent for explaining changes in the relationships between social structure and personality. Finally, they have been developing questions about pertinent aspects of orientation not included in the original inquiries (for example, political efficacy, attitudes toward democracy, and individualism-collectivism) and about aspects of family life (for example, family cohesion) that might be useful for our understanding of the intergenerational transmission of values. 3. There are topics that we did ask about in the original U.S. and Polish studies, but about which we did not have enough questions in the U.S. interview schedule to insure that, if one or two failed of translation, we would still have enough for multiple-indicator measures of the pertinent concepts in the Polish and Ukrainian data. A particularly pertinent example is fatalism, for which we have only three indicators. We have added questions where the initial batteries were small. 4. There are other questions that were developed for the U.S. studies but not used in the original Polish inquiry-- mainly questions about job conditions other than those directly pertinent to occupational self-direction--because the methodologists at the Polish Academy of Sciences thought them too subjective. Their criticism is apt, but such questions-- particularly about job uncertainties and job protections--have proved very valuable in the analyses of the U.S. and Japanese data and should be included in the new surveys. We have tried to improve on them, to make them less subjective. There were other questions in the U.S. survey that were not especially pertinent to then-socialist Poland--questions about ownership, for example--that are becoming more important to Poland and Ukraine today. 5. Finally, there are some questions that have never been entirely satisfactory in any of our studies, which we hope to improve on in these studies. One example is our questions about routinization of work, which are too limited in number, too subjective, and which have proved impotent in statistical analysis--leaving us in the quandary of not knowing whether routinization is less important than our theoretical beliefs led us to expect or simply not well enough measured in our studies. Another example is our limited information about bureaucratic structure, which none the less has proved to be an important dimension of job structure and--if only because of its intimate relationship to job protections (Kohn 1971 or Kohn and Schooler 1983, chapter 2)--may prove to be even more important with the radical reorganization of the economies of Poland and Ukraine. Language. The post-World War II Polish population being largely homogeneous as to ethnicity, the Polish survey can be conducted in one language, Polish. The situation is more complex in Ukraine. In theory, everyone understands Russian and, in practice, until recently Ukrainian surveys were generally conducted in Russian. Given the nationalist sentiments of the Republic, though, we think it desirable to give respondents their choice of being interviewed in Russian or in Ukrainian. Fortunately, the Ukrainian members of our research team are fluent in both languages, which is a great advantage not only for producing linguistically equivalent interview schedules but also for training bi-lingual interviewers. Translations. It has long been recognized (Nowak 1976, Scheuch 1968, Kohn 1987) that it is a matter of the utmost importance for cross-national research that the concepts we employ and the indices that we use to measure them be linguistically and culturally equivalent. Comparability of meaning is of critical importance. This means not only that the Polish and Ukrainian variants be as comparable as possible to each other, but also that both be as comparable as possible to those originally developed in the U.S.-Polish-Japanese comparative analyses. These are issues that matter first of all in the design of the surveys and the framing (and translation) of questions. These are matters to which we have given considerable attention in the past (see Kohn and Slomczynski 1990, especially chapter 2). They are even more important in the current research, because we now wish to make comparisons, not only cross-nationally and cross-systemically, but also between times of relative social stability and times of radical social change. In the original Polish study, we went to great lengths to translate questions taken from the U.S. surveys into linguistically and culturally equivalent Polish expressions. The initial translation was prepared by Slomczynski during a six-week stay in 1976 at the National Institute of Mental Health, where Kohn was then employed. In preparing that translation, Slomczynski discussed each of the questions thoroughly with Kohn and his colleagues, to be certain that the translation captured their intended meaning. Several versions of each translated question were then prepared by graduate students of the English Philology Department at the University of Warsaw. The alternative versions of the question were then judged collectively by a group of linguistic experts, subjected to a pilot study based on interviews with fifty persons selected from the upper and lower ends of the educational and occupational distributions, further revised, and again pretested and revised anew. When Paniotto visited Kohn at Johns Hopkins, where Kohn now works, for a month in February and March, 1990, they followed a similar procedure for the first step of translating the U.S. (and Polish) questions into Russian. They had the advantage, this time, of knowing where Slomczynski's efforts had succeeded and where they had fallen short. They had the further advantage that Paniotto understands both English and Polish, so his translations benefitted from his knowing not only the English original, but also the Polish equivalent. Paniotto and Khmelko are currently doing pretests of the Russian version of these questions, and developing and pretesting a Ukrainian version. We are in process of testing and refining the comparability of the Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian versions of what are meant to be parallel questions. INTENDED METHODS OF ANALYSIS Issues of comparability come to the fore again in the development of indices. Confirmatory factor analysis is a method of choice for developing truly comparable indices for use in cross-national research--mainly because it allows one to separate cross-nationally consistent underlying concepts from cross-nationally idiosyncratic variation in particular indicators. We have used confirmatory factor analysis extensively in our earlier comparative analyses (see Kohn and Slomczynski 1990) and intend to do so again in this research. Once we have developed cross-nationally consistent measurement models, we intend to use linear structural- equations modelling for causal analysis. The relationships between social-structural position and job conditions, and those between job conditions and personality, being quintessentially reciprocal, we have to employ methods of analysis that allow for reciprocal effects. For such analyses, linear structural-equations modelling is the method of choice. We have considerable experience in the use of this method (see Kohn and Slomczynski 1990). The intended analyses will, at the beginning, follow the models of the comparative analyses we have done before (particularly those in Kohn and Slomczynski 1990 and Kohn et al. 1990). Illustrative of these analyses are our prototypic models of the reciprocal relationships of occupational self- direction and psychological functioning. In later stages, there will be much more comprehensive analyses, using similar methods, intended not only to test the role of occupational self-direction in accounting for the relationships of social structure to personality under conditions of radical social change, but also--and crucially--to ascertain whether other proximate conditions play a more important role under such conditions. In using these methods of analysis, we face a very serious problem: definitive analyses of reciprocal effects require longitudinal data. Proper identification of the models is much more effectively achieved with longitudinal data. Moreover, and much more important, in a properly specified model it is necessary to control time-1 measurements of the endogenous variables when assessing the effects of other variables on the time-2 (or subsequent) measurements of those variables. But we shall have mainly cross-sectional data (except for follow-up data for the subsample of triads in the original Polish survey). In our past analyses of Polish and Japanese data, however, we have developed new methods for using cross- sectional data to simulate longitudinal analyses, applying sensitivity analyses to test the assumptions underlying these simulations. This time, we shall not have to import information from the U.S. longitudinal models, for we shall have new estimates of change over time from the follow-up study of the Polish triads. Even so, simulated models based on cross-sectional data cannot provide definitive results. But they do provide valuable prima facie evidence and certainly constitute a considerable improvement over methods of analyzing cross-sectional data that do not explicitly recognize, nor attempt to compensate for, the limitations of such data. Obviously, if the results of these analyses warrant, it would be highly desirable to extend our current cross-sectional inquiries to the collection of follow-up data for truly longitudinal analyses. We are making plans to do so. CONCLUSION In this study we attempt to conceptualize and assess three possible psychological consequences of radical social change. The first and theoretically most important psychological consequence is that radical social change may well affect one or more of the links between social-structural position and psychological functioning. Under conditions of radical social change, social structures--both the class structure and the system of social stratification--may themselves be radically altered; moreover, the links between social-structural position and conditions of work (and other important conditions of life) may be greatly affected; and the pivotal role of job conditions as an explanatory link between position in the social structure and psychological functioning may be weakened; finally, the very experience of radical social change may have such profound psychological consequences as to overwhelm social-structural influences on personality. By comparing the relationships of social-structural position to job conditions, and of job conditions to personality in the data of our 1978 Polish study and the data we are collecting in both Poland and Ukraine in 1992, we should be able to see if heretofore invariant relationships of social structure and personality continue to obtain under conditions of radical social change. We hope also to be able to compare people who have been--by their own accounts--more and less directly affected by recent change, to see to what extent the direct experience of changed conditions itself affects psychological functioning. Second, radical social change necessarily results in changes in the proportions of people who occupy various positions in the social structure. In particular, in Poland today much larger numbers of people are employers and there are many more who are unemployed or who are full-time housewives. The changes have not yet been as dramatic in Ukraine, but clearly unemployment is on the increase and other changes may follow. Even without any change in the relationships between social-structural position and individual psychological functioning, radical social change can have considerable psychological effect simply because large numbers of people are exposed to different social- structural conditions than they experienced before. Finally, if processes of change differentially affect the younger and older generations, as seems to be the case, then radical social change may even affect the intergenerational transmission of values. Here we are fortunate in that we shall have both longitudinal data on mother-father-child triads in Poland and data on new samples of triads in both Poland and Ukraine. This should provide a comparative basis for examining the intergenerational transmission of values during an earlier time of relative social stability and under current conditions. 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