Volume 26, Issue 3

The paper discusses the conceptual and methodological challenges of developing measures of stereotypes and prejudice for use in Slovakia. Developing these measures was the first step in a research project aimed at testing the effectiveness of direct and indirect contact interventions to reduce prejudice against stigmatized minorities, particularly the Roma. The first major problem in this kind of research relates to measuring the impact of interventions, as standardized instruments for measuring prejudice have yet to be developed in Slovak. The second problem concerns the risk that the interventions will fail to reduce anti-Roma prejudice, because of the strong stigmatization of the Roma minority in Slovakia. The paper also reviews existing measures of stereotypes and prejudice in social psychology and discusses their applicability for measuring anti-Roma prejudice in Slovakia. It is argued that measures of stereotypes and prejudice should be designed and used in a sensitive manner and that in the process of measuring various forms of social bias we should avoid reproducing its cognitive, emotional and behavioural manifestations.

The paper deals with cognitive interview, a method for pre-testing survey questions that is used in pilot testing to develop new measures and/or adapt ones in foreign languages. The aim is to explore the usefulness of the method by looking at two questionnaires measuring anti-Roma prejudice. The first, the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), contains questions that are dominantly used to test two dimensions of social perceptions of various groups: warmth and competence. The second, Interventions for Reducing Prejudice against Stigmatized Minorities (INTERMIN) consists of the items most frequently used in contact research to measure attitudes, social distance, anxiety, trust and behavioural intentions towards outgroups. Two rounds of cognitive interviews were held on both questionnaires to verbally evaluate participants’ understanding and/or interpretation of the draft questions. The first round was attended by university students, while the second round (with improved versions of the questionnaires) was done with high school students, as they are the target group for planned interventions based on the contact paradigm. The paper explains the problems/difficulties the participants had answering some of the questions and our attempts at improving the questionnaires. The problems can be grouped around six issues: The first two deal with the strategies participants used to answer our questions – whom exactly did they have in mind when answering the questionnaires and whose viewpoint did they represent in their answers. The next four problems are around nuances in the formulations of our questions and generally have to do with how the participants interpreted our questions – they concern assumptions that distinct items were logically interconnected, the period of time and locality referred to in our questions, translation and transferability of meanings from one language to another and double negation.

The paper suggests that there is a gap between the research on prejudice in Slovak schools and the pedagogical interventions used to reduce them, particularly in relation to the Roma minority. It highlights the existing curricular requirements for dealing with intergroup relations, stereotypes and prejudice, contrasting them with the organizational, methodological and practical constraints teachers face when trying to meet them. Drawing from experience of piloting alternative tools for measuring attitudes, designing interventions and assessing impact, the article describes one possible way of bridging the gap.

Childhoods in contemporary Kenya are entangled with discourses of care in a post-colonial landscape. Such imaginaries of childhoods through discourses of ‘care’ and ‘charity’ are well established through Western lenses. Another lens that is often enacted is the lens of de-commercialised, un-spoilt, pure and innocent childhoods in the Kenyan landscape. In this study, the authors utilize Nel Nodding’s concept of an ethics of care, and a feminist lens, to explore this binary of Western views through real experiences of childhoods. This paper provides an analysis of childhoods as lived experiences in Kenya, and challenges constructions of children/childhoods as vulnerable, based upon observations and interviews conducted in Kenya in the remote area of Kwale County.

The present paper is an inquiry into the role of the teacher in the context of the dominant Indian value system, an imposed curriculum and teacher-students interactions from the social psychological and critical interdisciplinary perspectives. The role of the school in the present modernist worldview is to frame and impart knowledge which may lead to economic growth. In this context, the role of the teacher is observed as being limited to a bearer of information rather than a leader who visualizes change and develops critical ability among students. Based on the theoretical framework of postformalism and collective/social identity, the current work argues that the role of the teacher is not limited to passively following and communicating mainstream values but involves constructing a new participative identity through critical pedagogical engagement and by acting as an active agent of social change.

The article outlines the basic contours of the current debate on literacy. Since the start of the millennium, the determining and dynamising factor in this debate has been information and communication technologies. The aim is to observe whether, and how, reading literacy, an important target category in education, is changing in this new reality. In the first part, the paper shows how the above questions are perceived and discussed in the field of relevant scientific disciplines from different points of view. In the second part, the research findings showing the risks and negative impacts of technologies are interpreted through the lenses of contemporary research on “new” literacy. Empirical research on specific aspects of online reading strategies and traditional print media reading are analysed and discussed in light of their contribution to reading literacy theory and education.

Richard Rorty interpreted religion as a historically constituted part of culture. As a philosopher, he sought primarily to understand religion’s socio-cultural nature and role. His approach was socio-critical, intellectually sympathetic and humanistic. The paper provides an account of Rorty’s key phases in his philosophy of religion. During phase one (the 1990s), he was primarily interested in whether, in a democratic society, religion should simply be a private matter or also one of public concern (and if so, then in what way and to what extent). During phase two (post-2000), his thinking on cultural politics developed more broadly, and he wrote about ‘romantic polytheism’ and the future of religion, etc. In his writing from phase one, he portrays himself as a ‘secular humanist’ as well as an atheist and, in his writing from phase two, as a ‘non-theist’ and ‘anti-clericalist’.

This study presents situational analysis as a suitable framework for the development of qualitatively-oriented interdisciplinary research in the social sciences. The article argues that even though interdisciplinary research is considered a coveted form of research practice, it is not particularly well developed in the social sciences. This is partly due to institutional barriers, but also because the majority of disciplines lack a suitable theoretical and methodological framework capable of unifying a variety of theoretical bases and primarily methodological processes. Situational analysis, which is based on the work of second generation grounded theorists, is ideal for this purpose, as it offers a frame for theoretical, epistemological, empirical and methodological interdisciplinarity.

When governments create refugee policies they consider several factors (security, economics, ethics, etc.). There are reasons why admitting refugees could have negative consequences (for example, security risks). On the other hand, if the recipient societies have ideals that stress the importance of helping other people, they should act according to their values. The aim of this article is to examine the concept of human dignity and show that European states should admit and help refugees because it is in accordance with their ethical values and the international agreements they have signed. This is important because when European countries hesitate to help refugees, they act not only contrary to their humane tradition, but they can harm them. The western concept of human dignity is one of the main values that stresses that each person is important—that they are equal and free.