Abstract
In the Introduction to this special issue of the International Journal of Sociology we illustrate the centrality of the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN to empirical research on main social, economic and political phenomena that shape the social structure. POLPAN 1988–2013 is the longest continuously run panel survey in Central and Eastern Europe that focuses on changes in the social structure with individuals as the units of analysis. To date, it is the only research worldwide that collects, for a length of 25 years, life histories from a nationally-representative sample of adults, and that also opens the possibility of panel research on renewal samples of the young. Thanks to the expanded samples of young respondents, scholars can also use POLPAN for cohort analyses. We discuss the role of POLPAN also in light of its history: POLPAN started as a government-funded project in state socialist Poland, and its subsequent waves capture all pivotal moments of contemporary Poland: the post-communist transformation, the joining of the EU, and the 2008 global economic crisis and its aftermath. Thus, the panel data are uniquely suited for analyzing how individuals influence the social structure while being influenced by it. We end this Introduction with a summary of the four papers included in the Special Issue, all of which employ data from the POLPAN project.
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