There are two ways of describing the conditions and quality of life of a society: its development potential and the direction of changes, threats and challenges. One of these is based upon institutional indicators – macroeconomic (such as GDP or the inflation rate) and macrosocial (such as the registered unemployment rate, the number of doctors per 100 thousand inhabitants, infant mortality, education or parliamentary election turnout). The other refers to the opinions and behaviors of citizens. Neither of these is fully accurate, reliable and sufficient. The fact that people become more affluent when GDP is increasing does not mean that they are more satisfied or more willing to demonstrate civic engagement. The registered unemployment rate does not necessarily have to reflect the actual ratio of people who are deprived of employment against their will. These two ways of describing society should be treated complementarily; they should balance and complement one another. Only when this condition is met, can politicians, business owners, and citizens be provided with an answer to two important questions: what the situation is and why it is not better – that is, a relatively comprehensive and reliable diagnosis. And a good diagnosis is necessary for effective therapy and wise reforms that minimize the social cost. Our project is an attempt to complement the diagnosis based upon institutional indexes, including the most recent general census (General National Census; GNC, 2002) with complex data regarding households, and the attitudes, frames of mind and behaviors of people who make up these households. It is a diagnosis of the conditions and quality of life of Poles from their own point of view. Using two separate questionnaires, we examined households and all of their available members, who are 16 or older. The complexities of our project means that we took into account in a single research project all of the important aspects of life of families and their members. This included both the economic (such as income, and material situation) and non-economic aspects (such as aspirations, health care, insurance, ways of coping with stress, life events, psychological well-being, lifestyle, pathological behaviors, participation in culture, use of modern communication technologies, etc). In this sense, it is an interdisciplinary project. This is also reflected by the composition of the Council for Social Monitoring, that is, the main authors of the project and the team of experts invited to join them by the Council. These groups include economists, a demographer, psychologists, sociologists, an insurance specialist, an expert in health economics and statisticians. In accordance with the original concept, the research conducted within the project of the Social Diagnosis has taken the panel form: every few years, we go back to the same households and people. The first measurement was conducted in the year 2000, and the subsequent one – three years later. The next two projects were conducted in two-year intervals. The project is always conducted in March in order to eliminate the seasonality effect. The present report shows not only the current image of Polish society; it also allows us to monitor changes in the same households and among the same people in a period of seven years.
Social Diagnosis is focused not on the analysis of transient opinions, but on more basic facts, behaviors, attitudes and experiences; it is not an ordinary descriptive survey – it is a scientific project. This is not only due to the fact that among the authors there are scientists, university employees and professors. The decisive factor is the professional system of work, based upon research experience of the members of the Council for Social Monitoring and the team of experts and – most of all – the theoretical context of the particular problems. Most variables taken into account on the project are not a result of intuition, informal observation or the demands of the sponsors, but of scientifically-based knowledge about the examined phenomena. An important objective of the Diagnosis is, apart from describing Polish society, to verify scientific hypotheses. In the present report, which is aimed at the ‗general public‘, it was necessary to limit the discussion of theoretical issues to a minimum. The most important issue is the answer to an open question: what is Polish society like, 18 years after the systemic transformation and 7 years after the first research conducted within the confines of the same project?
We hope that the results of implementing this project will provide politicians, business owners and local government activists responsible for the preparation, implementation and amendment of reforms that change the living conditions of all citizens with valuable knowledge. We would also like to provide society with reliable information regarding its everyday life, since the perception that individuals have of their own situation in comparison with that of other people are usually based upon selective observation, stereotypes or views that are propagated by the media. These are often false or exaggerated (informing the public, for instance, of the worsening condition of the psychological health in our society, of the complete paralysis of health care services, of retirees or older people being the social category that economically suffered most during the transformation process – to provide only a few examples). We all deserve a relatively accurate, comprehensive and objective diagnosis of the main sources of our everyday problems, ideas of psychological discomfort, uncertainty of the future or difficulty in adapting to the new conditions, but also pointing out the benefits of subsequent systemic transformations. Private diagnoses are often too illusory, defensive, simplified, and, in general, mistaken.
The differences between the present and the previous research pertain to the sample and the scope, reflected by the content of the questionnaire (see Annex). The sample was increased from the original 3005 in 2000 to 5532 households (thanks to this, the sample of individual respondents increased from 66625 to approximately 12641 people). Changes in the questionnaires in the subsequent research waves pertained to several modules. This year, the volume of the module concerning healthcare was dramatically reduced, while the labor market module was developed.
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The project comprises many aspects associated with the situation of households and individual citizens. The social indicators, taken into account here, can be divided into three general classes: the demographic and social structure of households, the living conditions of households associated with their material conditions, access to health care services, culture, recreation, education and modern communication technologies, the subjective quality of life, lifestyle, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of individual respondents. The indices that describe the demographic and social structure of the households are not subject to separate analysis in the present report; they serve only as a means of stratifying the groups of households and individuals in order to enable a comparison of the conditions and quality of life according to various social categories, such as gender, age, education level, place of residence, social and professional status, main source of income, civil status, type of household (created on the basis of the number of families and biological family type) and other criteria. Subject to analysis are, in fact, the living conditions of households and the quality of life of individual citizens in association with the social change that determines global context and general rules of the functioning of a society. One of the main problems and questions that accompany all social reforms is the distribution of advantages and costs that result from their implementation in particular social groups over varying time intervals. Also in this research project, we wanted to find out which categories of households and citizens find their feet in the new conditions and take advantage of the systemic transformations, and which social groups are unable to cope with the new situation, experiencing objectively or subjectively more losses than gains. In this project, the distinction between the social indicators of living conditions and the individual quality of life is more or less consistent with the distinction between the objective description of the situation (conditions) and its psychological meaning, expressed by the subjective opinion of the respondent (quality of life)*. This distinction is generally consistent with the type of unit examined and the measurement method. For the living conditions, the examined unit is the household as a whole, and for the quality of life – its individual members. The living conditions were measured by conducting an interview with one representative of the household (a well-informed person; most often, it was the head of the household). The quality of life, on the other hand, was measured using self-report questionnaire addressed to all available members of the examined households who have reached the age of 16. The measurement of living conditions of the household included: household income and their way of managing income, nutrition, material affluence of the household, including modern communication technology equipment (mobile phone, computer, Internet access), housing conditions, social benefits received by the household, education of children, participation in culture and recreation, taking advantage of health care services, household situation on the labor market, taking advantage of social benefits, insurance and retirement security, poverty and other aspects of social exclusion. Indicators of the quality of life and lifestyle of individual respondents included: general psychological well-being (including: the will-to-live, sense of happiness, satisfaction with life, depression), satisfaction with different areas and aspects of life, subjective evaluation of the material standard of living, various types of stress (including ―office stress associated with the contacts of public administration bodies, stress associated with health condition, stress associated with parenting, financial stress, stress associated with work, ecological stress, marital stress, problems associated with taking care of older people, stress associated with life events, such as assault, burglary, or arrest), psychosomatic symptoms (the measurement of distress treated as a general measurement of health conditions), strategies of coping with stress, evaluation of contacts with the health care system, personal finances (including: personal income, insurance and retirement security), system of values, risk seeking, lifestyle and individual behaviors and habits (such as smoking, the overuse of alcohol, the use of drugs, or religious practices), civic attitudes and behaviors, social support, general evaluation of the transformation process and its influence upon the lives of the respondents, use of modern communication technologies - computers and the Internet, mobile phones, etc, situation on the labor market and professional career.
* The two categories are not entirely distinct and separable. Thus when describing living conditions, we also used subjective evaluation scales, and in the part on the quality of life, we asked not only for opinions, but were also interested in behaviors (such as smoking, overuse of alcohol) and objective events (such as the death of a loved one or the renovation of an apartment/house).
