2007/2

The article compares the level of dependence of four justice ideologies on the structural position of an individual and his/her personal traits. First, the theoretical concept of distributive justice is introduced within the framework of Grid- Group Theory. Second, Czech public opinion of justice is analysed with data from the ISJP 2006 survey. Egalitarianism is the most structurally embedded ideology that is infl uenced by all socio-demographic attributes. Nevertheless, psychological factors aff ect the other ideologies to some extent. Ascriptivism is more characteristic of extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness; individualism of openness to experience; fatalism of closeness to experience. Against structural eff ects, the psychological dimension does not yield considerable improvement in the explanation of justice ideologies.

Family may be defi ned as a relatively durable group of persons which is based on blood relations, is caused by marriage eventually by adoption and its main functions are reproduction, upbringing, but also carry over cultural models. Meaning of marriage institution is very often discussed topic not only in context of this defi nition. These discussions are provoked not only by opinions and questions in terms of marriage as an outworn institution, but also by the results of demographic statistic. In these results we can see trends of decreasing nuptiality, perhaps even weakening of family in the basic word sense (low fertility in general, growth of proportion of extramarital born children etc.). Introductory part of this article aff ords view of continuance of nuptiality during the twentieth century and also outline of some aspects that contribute to current nuptiality situation. The second part is focused on attitudes of Czech public towards marriage and on their ideas about importance and sense of marriage as well as.

The article stands as a second part of a series about the question answering process during standardized surveys and elaborates the memory retrieval phase. At the beginning the main psychological conceptions of memory are introduced (structure, traits, information types), which are then used for the analysis of the function of memory during survey answering process. The second part deals with the issue of factual information retrieval: the topic of initial encoding of the information into the memory; the role of cognitive keys in case of further retrieval; and consequences of those for the possibilities of the standardized inquiry. The attention is paid also to the problem of inaccessible information and to the usage of more general parts of autobiographical memory (schemas, scenarios etc.) instead of original entries. The third part elaborates the issues of temporal information retrieval like strategies used by respondents or biases emerging in case of them (e.g. seam eff ect and telescoping).

The article is based on the importance of the political culture in czech public opinion. Following the data obtained at Public Opinion Research Centre´s polls the author analyse how critical are czech citizens when talking about political culture of most of politically active people. The fi rst part of the article is devoted to the explanation of the concept of political culture and its use in sociological and politological theory.

The agenda setting function of mass media became one of the most pervasive concept examining long term eff ects of mass media on society. Meanwhile most of the media scholars works have focused on the relationships of media agenda and public agenda in the last thirty years, there is lack of empirical works dealing with aspects of agenda building process so far, above all aspects concerning mutual infl uences of various media contents. Presented paper examine intermedia agenda setting of Czech national media. Based on quantitative content analysis it search the regular patterns of “media quoting other media” and contexts in which media refer to other media as a source of information.

The text with some additions introduces to Czech audience a work of Scott L. Althaus and Devon M. Largio, who back in 2004 were analyzing origins and consequences of shift in America’s public enemy no. 1 from Osama bin Laden to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein that occurred during period after 9/11 terrorist attacks on WTC and Pentagon and before U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. By charting the changing levels of public attention given to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in American news coverage and in president G. W. Bush’s public statements and by comparison of these trends with a full range survey fi ndings that appear to reveal widespread misperceptions about the link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, their analysis provided a clear perspective on the timing and impact of the administration’s communication eff orts as well as revealed a fact contradictory to popular view that mistaken beliefs about Saddam Hussein’s culpability were less a product of the Bush administration’s public relations campaign than of the 9/11 attacks themselves. The text tries to point out some more general incidence of these fi ndings relating to relationship of political, news and public agendas as well as methodology and interpretations of polls.

The electronic version of the second number of the fifth edition of the review Czech Society (Naše společnost). Czech Society issues Center for Public Opinion Research, Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.