Abstract
Our intention is to describe, to an English language audience, the experience of joblessness in post-communist Poland after the Great Recession. By experience, we mean how people perceive and recount a situation that they lived through. By joblessness we mean the absence of paid employment. We investigate women and men who are currently out of work, or have recently been jobless and are now reemployed, and homemakers - what is popularly referred to as “housewives”. The time period of our study is 2011–2013. The empirical foundations of this book are two related data sources: the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN (polpan.org), conducted every five years since 1988, and the 2012 Joblessness project that collected qualitative and quantitative data from a select group of POLPAN respondents.
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Notes
- 1.
We acknowledge that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary joblessness can be blurry, as apparently voluntary acts of leaving the labor market can be conditioned by contextual forces.
- 2.
U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/bls/glossary Accessed September 30, 2014. A key nuance is in the last sentence, in which the “looking for a job” requirement is waived for those who are waiting to go back to the same job they were just laid off from. People in this situation are jobless, but likely their experience would be different.
- 3.
- 4.
www.statista.com/statistics/376395/employment-by-economic-sector-in-poland/ Accessed May 10, 2018.
- 5.
To counter attrition and aging and facilitate further longitudinal research, since 1998 the core panel is supplemented with additional subsamples involving young adults, aged 21–25 years. POLPAN 2018 is currently in the field.
- 6.
Respondents in Groups 1–4 were asked questions related to job loss, including an open-ended question about how they became unemployed. We engage more with this information in Chaps. 5 and 7. For housewives, questions revolved around the process of making household care their main activity, including an open-ended question about the circumstances and main reasons that led to this decision (see also Chap. 6 in this book).
- 7.
For more details on interviewers and their training, see Chap. 4.
- 8.
Note that, unlike Houtkoop-Steenstra 2000, we do not employ Conversation Analysis.
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Tomescu-Dubrow, I., Dubrow, J.K., Kiersztyn, A., Andrejuk, K., Kołczyńska, M., Slomczynski, K.M. (2019). Introduction: The Experience of Joblessness in Poland. In: The Subjective Experience of Joblessness in Poland. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13647-5_1
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