Bogdan Voicu

Romanian Academy · Research Institute for Quality of Life (ICCV)

NOTE: This preprint reports new research that has not been certified by peer review and should not be used to guide clinical practice. This paper explores the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the capacity of the Polish and Romanian organizations providing services to Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw and Bucharest, with a focus on disabled r...

This toolkit is a companion to the report “The capacity of Polish and Romanian stakeholders to provide support to Ukrainian refugees with disabilities in the metropolitan areas of Warsaw and Bucharest” (Nowicka et al., 2024), which aims to depict the organizational effort to support refugees with disabilities from Ukraine to Warsaw and Bucharest. T...

The project aimed to diagnose and understand the current situation and the type of assistance provided to refugees with disabilities, using Ukrainian war refugees as an example. Our research is based on a scientific approach that draws inspiration from the concept of the „organizational field” as the unit of analysis. This means that we focus o...

Uncertainty and risk became key concepts in social sciences in the past half century (Douglas, 1986; Lupton, 2013; Stalker, 2003). The post-modern world was labeled as a risk society (Beck, 1992), since constant reassessment of the situations in which one finds oneself, increases one's knowledge, but decreases certainty (Voicu, 2005). A world of li...

Young people Not in Employment, Education, or Training (NEET) have become a target population of policymaking in Europe. After one decade of political attention and corresponding policy action, we consider it a good time to take stock of the literature that has dealt with young people who are classified as NEET and the policies adopted in response...

In recent years, we have witnessed an increasingly visible right-wing populist rhetoric against gender equality across the globe, and this phenomenon has been explained and analyzed as a cultural backlash, which has pervaded political discussions and has led to polarization in political communication, reviving old debates on gender equality and bri...

Refugees increasingly become part of the European societies. Afghans, Syrians, Ukrainians fled their countries due to war, conflicts, persecution, and settled, temporary or not, in more stable countries. During pandemics, with openness towards foreigners shrinking, and borders closing, the situation of refugees might become uncertain. Our scoping r...

Youth unemployment has been an issue in European countries for many years. However, the attention paid to it by policymakers has varied over time, and there are high cross-country variations in both the size of the phenomenon, representations of it, and policy interventions. This study adds an intra-country component to the country-comparative dime...

During the 2020 Spring lockdown, here was an increase in working from home incidence. For many it was a premiere, others have had previous experience with the phenomena, but all needed to manage post/during pandemic work recovery and micro-breaks. The latter were particularly important, as typical communication points that increase permeability of...

The study of spatial accessibility to healthcare services is key to health policy (Pförtner et al., 2019; Vergier et al., 2017). Terms such as 'rurality' or 'medical desertification' were employed to stress the relevance of the topic. Within the existing literature, there is little (if any) concern with the legitimacy of the existing ways to measur...

Increasingly visible migrant communities that coexist within transnational spaces (Vertovec, 2009) are part of a contemporary world marked by a changing political approach to immigration, in which integration is the key word. The vagueness of the term (Schinkel, 2017) is compensated by the potential benefits derived from its usage. Given its multid...

This article aims to retrospectively investigate the embeddedness of attitudes toward immigrants (ATI) in cultures of solidarity seen as general orientations toward solidarity measured at a country level. We predict individual-level ATI with country-level aggregated indicators of solidarity that were observed decades earlier. The latter measure loc...

This study explores how researchers' analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in...

In light of the increasing interest in academic integrity, this paper investigates how students from three major Romanian universities conceive academic integrity. We build up an argument of dependency of such definitions on existing academic culture, and on how fast universities, faculties, or fields of study grow with respect to number of enrolle...

In our study, we examine the religious characteristics of the Hungarians in Transylvania, who once used to be part of the state-forming nation in Hungary but have long been an ethnic minority in Romania. We raise the question about the position of this group in terms of religious belonging, practice and faith between the Romanian and Hungarian soci...

The paper reports findings from a crowdsourced replication. Eighty-four replicator teams attempted to verify results reported in an original study by running the same models with the same data. The replication involved an experimental condition. A “transparent” group received the original study and code, and an “opaque” group received the same unde...

Findings from 162 researchers in 73 teams testing the same hypothesis with the same data reveal a universe of unique analytical possibilities leading to a broad range of results and conclusions. Surprisingly, the outcome variance mostly cannot be explained by variations in researchers’ modeling decisions or prior beliefs. Each of the 1,261 test mod...

Solidarity is core to Europe's societal organisation and was intensively addressed in recent research. Using data collected before and during the lockdown in spring 2020, we examine whether value orientations towards solidarity changed in three countries (Spain, Hungary, and Romania). Before the pandemic, people in Spain expressed higher solidarity...

This paper discusses current challenges of the welfare regime in Romania, from the standpoint of postmodern cultural changes that started to affect society. Acording to the main argument, Romania is intertwined with other societies that have already underwent through fundamental changes due to increasing postmodern cultural orientation. Such proces...

In an era of mass migration, social scientists, populist parties and social movements raise concerns over the future of immigration-destination societies. What impacts does this have on policy and social solidarity? Comparative cross-national research, relying mostly on secondary data, has findings in different directions. There is a threat of sele...

This volume documents the life uncertainties revealed by migrants' biographies. For international migrants, life journeys are less conventional or patterned, while their family, work, and educational trajectories are simultaneously more fragmented and intermingled. The authors discuss the challenges faced by migrants and returnees when trying to ma...

This book focuses on the uncertainties revealed by migrants’ biographies whose shapes are less conventional or patterned, while their family, work, and educational careers are simultaneously more fragmented and intermingled. As Gardner (Age, Narrative and Migration: The Life Course and Life Histories of Bengali Elders in London. Oxford: Berg Publis...

Each chapter in this book documents ways in which migration is intertwined with life pathways, and tells the story on how migration shapes and is shaped by work, family, and educational pathways. Examples come from a variety of migration flows (Poles in Ireland; Romanians and Moroccans in Italy; Spanish, Portuguese, and Italians in Switzerland), de...

This article examines the question whether rejection experiences negatively relate to the social trust of Children Born of War (CBOW) and if this connection is mediated by sense of self-worth. CBOW is a group of people born out of relations during war- and post-war times, involving one parent being a foreign soldier, a para-military officer, rebel...

Our paper starts by portraying our views on social change and on the role that value change plays in the mix of social change. Then, we explain the selection of the four domains – attitudes towards welfare state, attitudes towards democracy, the participative culture, and gender beliefs – and what we expect to see in a post-communist society. We do...

Gender equality has progressed a great deal in recent decades in response to modernisation, industrialisation, and the generally rising level of education. A transformation in gender beliefs has accompanied the progress on gender equality and beliefs about gender roles have mainly changed in countries in North America and Europe, while in Muslim an...

In 2015 more than one million refugees were seeking protection in the EU, the majority fleeing war and violence in the Middle East and heading towards a few EU-member states like Austria, Germany and Sweden. This is a small number compared to the overall prob-lem of persons being forced to leave their homes because of war and persecution. In 2016 t...

This paper considers the case of the international migrants’ confidence in political institutions, from a social embeddedness perspective on political trust. We use country-level aggregates of confidence in institutions as indicators of specific cultures of trust, and by employing data from the European Values Study, we test two competing hypothese...

The present report summary includes the most important conclusions and recommendations presented in each chapter. For further explanations, tables, graphics, data sources, bibliography and complete recommendations see the Extended Report, the main result of the Commission’s activity, available only in Romanian language ( www.presidency.ro/static/CP...

This paper considers two assumptions commonly used in analyzing the formation of social trust. They stress the importance of early socialization, on one hand, and of life events, on the other. We consider birth as a major life event for anyone and focus on the situation of Children Born of War. This group, even if lesser visible in some societies,...

Life satisfaction, as an indicator of subjective well-being, has received increasing attention in the recent decades. It has become a potential indicator of development, to be used complementary to objective measures. However, no clear consensus exists on the relationship between life satisfaction and satisfaction with the various domains of life a...

In times of economic turmoil, do high-skilled immigrants (HSIMs) tremble, or are they better suited than non-immigrants or low-skill immigrants to cope with such instability? This paper sheds some light on HSIMs’ social integration during crisis by considering their life satisfaction, ability to get paid work, and civic participation. European Soci...

Scholars concerned with cultural postmodernization tend to agree on several basic assertions. Among them, at least one directly refers well-being and quality of life. Postmodernization is not only about social and economic change but also about intimate changes at individual level. People start to focus on achieving a better life without focusing p...

This article explains the variation in the life satisfaction of international migrants across Europe using the idea of the cultural embeddedness of subjective well-being, expressed in various approaches such as social comparison theory, the Easterlin paradox and Cummins' (2003) assumption of normativeness. The authors claim that immigrants' levels...

Two explanations, institutionalization and socialization, are generally used to explain the impact of social context on how much one trusts others. This paper uses the case of international immigrants to show that the two assumptions are complementary. Crossclassified multilevel models fitted on EVS 2008-2009 data prove that immigrants’ levels of s...

This paper looks at country-average results in surveys of student-achievements like PISA, PIRLS or TIMSS. As other recent papers do (Fensham, 2007; Minkov, 2008), I advance the idea that the between-countries differences are determined by cultural factors. Focusing on the macro-level, I discuss social values as part of the contextual determinants f...

LISER presented the Growing Inequalities' Impacts (GINI) country report for Luxembourg. Even if the country can still be considered a low inequality country by international standards, this trend is a potential source of concern. Several factors may explain the increase in income inequality. Income source decomposition analysis reveals that the rel...

This paper uses insights from the literature on social capital and from the sociology of values to explain dependency of immigrants’ involvement in associations depend on the norms of participation in their country of origin as well as the norms of their host countries. The argument is that changing the social context should lead to changing partic...

This papers tests for acquiescence effects on the attitudes towards immigrants. We employ the case of Romania, a country with very little incoming migration, but with an important outgoing flow. This makes the respondents less exposed to interaction with immigrants, but with a high probability to know emigrants, and to have emigrants in the immedia...

This paper measures the impact of immigration on migrants' involvement in associations across Europe. Using multilevel analysis on European Social Survey (ESS) data, we address three questions: Are immigrants likely to become members in voluntary associations? Does this likelihood change with the length of stay in the host country? Does the type of...

Large scale comparative studies, such as the value surveys (EVS and WVS) or the Eurobarometer, include measurements for parental/child-rearing values. This reflects a persistent interest for the topic, which produced salient studies starting with the first half of the twentieth century (Lynd and Lund 1929; Duvall 1946). Various scholars report data...

The bulk of the literature investigating the connection between social capital and the welfare state explores the impact of the latter one on various manifestations of the first one. The tested assumption is therefore usually related to the effects of the institutional arrangements on the existing resources. Our paper proposes a different approach,...

The bulk of the literature investigating the connection between social capital and the welfare state explores the impact of the latter one on various manifestations of the first one. The tested assumption is therefore usually related to the effects of the institutional arrangements on the existing resources. Our paper proposes a different approach,...

Writings on international migrations have emphasized the importance of social networks. Most studies have focused on how migration networks contribute to launching and sustaining the flow of immigrants. Less attention has been paid to the persons who, after settling in the destination country, maintain networks and thus help newcomers. This article...

Rural-urban inequalities of access to higher education occasionally come on the top of the Romanian agenda of education debate. However, there are few attempts to estimate these differences, both in quantitative (access to university) and qualitative terms (differences between fields of study). Our paper focuses on the quantitative inequalities. Ou...

Writings on international migrations have emphasized the importance of social networks. Most studies have focused on how migration networks contribute to launching and sustaining the flow of immigrants. Less attention has been paid to the persons who after settling in the destination country, maintain networks and thus help newcomers. This article...

Studying community is very common in current Romanian academic and non-academic research. For instance, assessing the impact of most development projects requires the study of the potentially affected communities, both before, during and after the implementation of the project. Community studies suppose the manipulation of both qualitative and quan...

the book is in Romanian. An English version of chapter four is available

Raportul de faţă îşi propune să discute despre absolvenţii recenţi de învăţământ superior din România. În centrul atenţiei stau traiectoriile pe care aceştia le au pe piaţa muncii, tipul de munci pe care le prestează, legătura dintre activitatea profesională și cele studiate în facultate, atât din punct de vedere al nivelului de calificare necesar,...

The article focuses on the impact of religion and technological developments on the sharing of domestic work in European countries. Religious beliefs and practices have a significant impact on gender roles, as those who are more religious are more likely to support traditional gender work division. Some religions are more likely to encourage tradit...

Volunteers and volunteering in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper focuses on volunteering behaviour, as an expression of a participative culture. We are interested in the cultural and social determinants of volunteering, both at individual level, but mainly at the aggregate (country) level. We note that the phenomenon has a lower incidence in t...

The paper considers the existing balance between the bonding and the bridging social capital in Romania, focusing on the risks which might occur for the community development projects. Firstly, a brief review of the literature discuss the bonding/ bridging distinction, its liquidity, the positive and the negative consequences of the existing social...

The volume present an analysis of the Romanian university system from the perspective of its main actors: students and professors.

Division of the housework within the couple is the topic of this paper. We are specifically interested if the gender is still salient in the sharing of the domestic works, and which is its relative importance when controlling for various factors such as education, income, spouses’ occupational status, the type of social policies within the respecti...

The paper focuses on the factors influencing sharing of the domestic work in the European countries. Many of the previous studies have offered the individual level explanations, taking into account only the individual characteristic when predicting the spouses’ contribution to the chores. Using multilevel regression models, we try to combine the in...

This paper presents the main results of a recent survey of private higher education institutions from twelve selected European countries (Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia) [in the framework of the UNESCO‐CEPES project on “Private Higher Education in Europe and Quality Assurance an...

This report examines quality of life from the unique perspective of the two acceding countries, Bulgaria and Romania. The historical, political, socioeconomic and cultural contexts of these two countries have meant that their experiences are often quite different to those of the EU Member States. In an attempt to identify the similarities and diffe...