Description

• Title:
  The Experience of Systemic Transformation in Contemporary Biographical Narratives of Older Poles
• Creator:
  Życzyńska-Ciołek, Danuta
• Contributor:
  Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland;
  Danuta Życzyńska-Ciołek is a Research and Archiving Specialist at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She has been a member of the Polish Panel Survey (POLPAN) research team since 2012. Her research interests include methodology of social sciences, social data archiving, biographical perspective in sociology, and life course studies.;
  dzyczynska-ciolek@ifispan.waw.pl
• Description:
  The aim of this article is to explore whether—from the subjective perspective of people born before the end of WWII—systemic transformation brought about significant changes in their individual lives, and if yes—what was the meaning of those changes for them. In particular, I examine how experiences related to the events that preceded systemic transformation in Poland or took place during its most intensive stage are reflected in contemporary biographical narratives of 49 persons aged 72 or more, for whom the period of professional activity, in whole or in major part, occurred in the times of the Polish People’s Republic. I perform the analysis in three steps. First, I investigate the place of systemic transformation in the narratives, and consider the reasons why it is relatively often absent or poorly reflected there. Second, I present thematic motifs prevailing in those interviews where references to the systemic change appear. In the third step, I investigate the meaning of experiences connected with transformation for the narrators, the accompanying emotions—some of them still persisting—and ways in which the narrators incorporated those experiences into their biographies. The underlying narratives come from people who were drawn for a nationwide quantitative panel survey many years ago, in 1987, and participated in it for the next 25-30 years.;
  The works leading to this publication were carried out within the following projects financed by the National Science Center, Poland: “Significant Life Events and Turning Points in the Biographies of the Oldest Respondents of the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN” (grant no. 2017/25/N/HS6/01928) and “Multidimensional Biographies and Social Structure: Poland 1988-2018” (grant no. 2017/25/B/HS6/02697).
• Object availability:
  free access
• Rights:
  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.;
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
• Date:
  2019.11.22;
  2019
• Type:
  Article
• Language:
  English
• Format:
  application/pdf
• Publisher:
  Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Relation:
  Qualitative Sociology Review; 4;
  15
• Subject:
  Systemic Transformation;
  Biographical Narrative;
  Older People;
  Polish Panel Survey POLPAN
• Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/11089/30876 ;
  1733-8077;
  10.18778/1733-8077.15.4.02
• Data provider:
  Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Can I use it?:
  check license
• Type:
  image