Grants

The project focuses on research on the recent housing paths of young people known as millennials (born between 1985 and 2000) who are facing a boom in housing prices and decreasing housing affordability. The goal of is to survey the main strategies that young people use to overcome the problem of decreasing housing affordability. These private strategies, but also hypothetical state policy reactions, have a wider impact of the housing system and inequality, which this project intends to examine. For this purpose, the research team will employ both quantitative and qualitative research methods that include new attitude survey and original microsimulation modelling. The project will be conducted in four selected urban centres. The project aims to add to existing youth, housing affordability and generational inequality studies but especially to the literature on trends in post-socialist housing systems, intergenerational housing wealth transfers, and housing inequality.

Despite the fact that Central and Eastern Europe is often considered as a distinctly secularized European region, there are almost no contemporary extensive studies on the consequences of secularization, atheisms and the phenomenon of so called non-religion. Generally, much less attention has been paid to the analysis of the topic then to the study of traditional and modern forms of religion. If studied, scholars were mostly interested in the historical and social causes of the decreased religiosity in particular countries, but much less in the study of modern nature of faithlessness. The project starts filling this gap by approaching the question of secularization from a new direction: instead of the usual “decline of religion”, it focuses on the “rise and ‘faces of non-religion” using novel interdisciplinary approach by combining historical, sociological anthropological methods. The project provides new stance to the discussion on secularization, new forms of atheism and non-religion, and will provide new knowledge about the role of religion and secularity in the region.

The proposed qualitative research will focus on the study of siblinghood in late adulthood and old age and result in an inductive-constructed theory of siblinghood (grounded theory [Charmaz 2014]).
The objective of the qualitative research is to understand siblinghood, i.e. (1) to reveal the core of adults’ experience of siblinghood and identify meanings related to attachments among siblings in a late age; to understand (2) the conditions influencing siblings’ contacts and relationships and the ways in which they are influenced and with what consequences; (3) the circumstances or reasons for their maintenance or failure; (4) the processes of negotiation of relationships and exchange of support among siblings, or strategies of maintaining or re/constituting sibling attachments. 
The qualitative study, designed as multisource research, will interconnect the perspective of particular siblings, or other family members, and will provide more dimensions of reflection of siblinghood as well as a complex perspective of the mutual interconnection of relationships defined by membership in the family of origin and in the families of procreation of particular siblings. 

web: https://www.ff.upol.cz/en/department-of-sociology-andragogy-and-cultural-anthropology/academics-research/grants/graying-siblingood/

The project follows in the tradition of international local government studies. The goal is to provide a complex picture of local leadership in the Czech Republic through international and domestic surveys and a secondary analysis. As key actors in local government, mayors personify political leadership at the municipal level. The diversified nature of Czech municipalities constitutes a convenient frame for the study of the institutional, structural and individual conditionality of the execution of the role of mayor. For this reason, the project includes: 1) participation in an international survey of mayors of towns; 2) a Czech survey of mayors of smaller municipalities; 3) the linking of the survey data set with a set of contextual data on municipalities; 4) the updating of a unique database of political mandate holders, which will enable study of the issue of incumbency and multi-level political careers.

The project focuses at identifying concepts of teaching in the context of university instruction by leaders (reputable academics who have significantly contributed to the development of science) and architects (academics involved in designing future trends through participating in the “advanced” university teaching in PhD studies) of educational sciences (pedagogy/education, andragogy/adult education, special education) in the Czech Republic in two dimensions. The first one interprets the changes of leaders´ concepts of teaching in the context of university instruction during the last 25 years with regard to the profound changes of Czech society after 1989, while the second one is primarily focused on the identification of possible future trends in teaching in the context of university instruction. To achieve this, the discourse-historical approach, narrative methods and delphi method are used. The project captures the “nearly invisible” academics´ role thus contributes to theory development of educational sciences and their diverse fields (university pedagogy, pedeutology etc.).