DOI: 10.7910/dvn/daph0p
title: Polish Panel Survey POLPAN

description: The Polish Panel Survey POLPAN is a unique program of panel surveys carried out since 1988 in 5-year intervals, and focused on describing the social structure and its change during the last 25-30 years in Poland.
Since its early days, POLPAN relied on the theoretical traditions of social structure research. The first of those traditions was the analysis of social structure in terms of social relations and, in particular, control and subordination of some social categories to others (a class approach). The second tradition focuses on analysing the distribution of commonly desired goods (a stratification approach). The third tradition, tracing its roots to humanistic sociology, analyses psychological states which—when presented in the institutional context of their bearers—can represent a foundation for the formation of social groups (a socio-psychological approach).
Initially, in 1988, the survey was conducted among a national sample representing Poland’s adult population (aged 21-65), with N = 5,817. In 1993, this sample was randomly reduced to 2,500 individuals, whom researchers tried to reach in each of the consecutive five-year waves. To ensure an adequate age balance, additional subsamples involving young cohorts have been supplemented later. For example, the 2008 sample comprised 1,825 respondents of whom 1,244 belong to the strict panel, while 581 cases consist of newly added individuals aged 21-25 years. In 2013 we made an attempt to contact all respondents (7,261) who have ever participated in the study. The most recent wave of the study was carried out in 2018.
The POLPAN study is special also with respect to the scope of the collected data. Socio-demographic information of respondents and their families is supplemented by items on socio-political attitudes, some of them present in cross-national studies. At the same time, POLPAN includes the nonverbal Raven test, which captures intellectual flexibility (an essential IQ component), and the Nottingham Health Profile, which measures certain aspects of physical and mental health.
The project deals with interdisciplinary problems that can be labeled as follows: the “old” and “new” elements in the social structure; changes in the class structure; social mobility; differences in the standard of living; the process of adaptation to a market economy; the impact of the location in social structure on political attitudes and behavior; perception of social conflicts; winners, losers, and the European integration; health issues; emigration.
These research areas are important since they pertain to individuals’ allocation to positions in the system of social inequalities (who is located where in the social structure?) and distribution of goods in the society (who gets what and why?). Both the individuals’ allocation and distribution of goods can be more or less effective. We plan to assess allocative and distributional effectiveness in the context of the impact of intellectual and social resources on individuals’ biographies.
POLPAN is carried out by the Team for Comparative Analyses of Social Inequality (CASIN) at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN), and in cooperation with researchers from other Polish and international academic institutions. The full documentation of the POLPAN data is available on the project website: http://polpan.org/en/