Original scientific paper
Social Background of the Young Scholars and Scientists and (Self)restoration of Science
Adrijana Šuljok
orcid.org/0000-0003-1762-2191
; Institute for Social Research in Zagreb
Abstract
This paper is questioning a social selection, respectively, recruitment to science through a
perspective of the social background of the generation of young scientists and scholars in
Croatia and its changes in the last quarter of the century. First of all by using the data collected
via postal enquiry in the research carried out in 2004 on the representative sample
of the scientists and scholars, we analyzed the social background of the generation of the
youngest researchers which was operationalized by using the variables - the size of the locality
of growing up and the educational background of father. The results of this research
generally corroborated the findings of the previous studies that ascertained an exceptional
eliteness of the social background within the scientific profession. Mostly urban and
high-education background, respectively, a lesser part of the respondents of rural provenance
and with parents of low-education point to possible problems in accessibility to education
and in triggering interest in science of deprivileged social groups. However, there
is an indicative trend of lowering the level of eliteness of the social background when
speaking of the youngest generation of the scientists and scholars. And finally, our results
suggest erasing of the division to socially more elite or less elite scientific areas, which is
consistent with some results from abroad, but not with the results of the national researches.
Keywords
young scientists and scholars; social background; social selection; scientific areas; elitism
Hrčak ID:
93831
URI
Publication date:
22.12.2006.
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