In this article the authors considered problems of the realization of youth policy in the Republic of Kazakhstan. There are some factors which objectively complicate the realization of youth policy in Kazakhstan: the lack of social-political ideology which could be able to play the part similar to the role of communist ideology in the USSR or liberal-democratic one in the USA, the domination of ethnic identity over the civil one; the system of values, which unites community, must not only be a subject for general consensus in the society but gather the youth together emotionally, appealing to an irrational beginning in individual and massive psychology; the problem of social growth of the youth. Mostly, the youth in Kazakhstan can be divided into two groups: socially safe and socially unsafe. In the article analysis methods and content analysis were used as well as the results of sociologic researches.

Activity recognized as terrorist in the Piła Voivodship in the 1980s in the light of the object case code-named «Violence» (selected issues)

The object-related case, codenamed “Violence”, was conducted by the 3rd Department of the District Offi ce of Internal Aff airs in Piła during the years of 1984–1990. Its purpose was to identify, neutralize and eliminate acts bearing the hallmarks of terror, in particular; killings, beatings or deprivation of liberty for political reasons, explosions and arson of political objects and state institutions, collecting weapons and explosives in order to organize terrorist attacks, kidnapping people and planes, illegal political and nationalist organizations that use terror as a form of combat, as well as the operational control of channels to terrorist centres in capitalist countries.

Electoral Knowledge of Generation “Z” in the Perspective of a Quantitative Study on Secondary School Students in Warsaw

The research problem of the described study was the electoral knowledge of representatives of generation Z. The aim of the content of the article is to clarify the extent to which today’s secondary school students are familiar with the principles of electoral law and to determine the significance of gender on their level of knowledge in this area; obtaining information on the self-assessment of knowledge regarding electoral law and elections, as well as the importance of the length of learning for the level of self-assessment, as well as learning about the most convenient form of voting in the opinion of secondary school students. Research to date in this area has mainly focused on the millennial generation, not on today’s youth. This text therefore seeks to fill this gap. The study was carried out by means of a diagnostic survey using a survey technique and an online survey questionnaire research tool.

Not only a discussion. About participatory forms and methods of youth organizations operating in the territory of Ukraine

The subject of the text concerns various forms and methods of the participation of selected Ukrainian youth organizations, which were particularly active in 2018. The author discusses the basic theoretical assumptions by analyzing the issue of participation in relation to Polish and foreign literature of the subject. Then, she describes the research material and methods of analysis of the collected empirical data. In the last part of the article, the author presents the most important conclusions regarding the „soft” and „hard” forms and methods of the participation of six youth organizations operating in Ukraine.

Adaptation strategies of borderland youth – a report from generational studies

The conducted discussion is embedded in pedagogy of youth, Robert Merton’s theory of social adaptation, the concept of intercultural education and the concept of “intercultural identity” by Jerzy Nikitorowicz. In the article, the strategies are presented of the adaptation of young inhabitants of the Polish-Czech borderland to school conditions and the requirements of social life. The results of some diagonal studies among secondary school learners, conducted 13 years apart, indicated two dominant strategies of conformism and innovation, revealed a slight decrease in the average value of conformism (3%) and a significant increase in the average value of innovation (22% change). In that context, the features of permanent socialization taking place in the conditions of the Polish-Czech borderland were indicated: dynamism, bidirectionality, functioning/being “in-between”, cultural pattern, the principle of continuum. Empirically determined adaptation strategies of youth show how young people handle a complex reality and how they can join the mainstream of social life.

Cooperation of migrants with Polish diaspora organizations as a factor of social capital growth in a multicultural society

The article concerns the activity of the Polish community in Canada in the context of social capital. It presents the results of sociological empirical research carried out using an online questionnaire survey among Canadian Polish youth who cooperate with a Polish community organization and the one that does not undertake such cooperation. The respondents participating in the study function in the multicultural society of Canada on a daily basis, which – as it turned out in the course of the analyses – creates an opportunity to acquire and accumulate social capital resources. The article also describes selected theoretical concepts regarding this resource. Their analysis was made by taking into account three components that appear in Robert Putnam’s approach: trust, norms and connections of the respondents. It was presented how respondents define trust itself and what level of trust they have in relation to selected social groups. Their view on the relationship between belonging to social organizations (e.g. The Władysław Reymont Foundation) with norms and morality was also described. The article also presents the frequency of respondents’ contacts with selected groups and their opinions on social organizations. The empirical considerations allowed to verify the research hypothesis that cooperation with The Władysław Reymont Foundation is conducive to the social capital of migrants.

Youth and the values of the democratic social order. A report from dynamic and comparative studies

The text is a presentation of the preliminary results of team research on the attitude of students towards the value of the renewal of social order, reconstructed in Piotr Sztompka’s “renewal decalogue”. On the basis of the results of the exploration carried out 30 years ago on “Youth in relation to the values and norms of social life”, a new scientific research was designed. It was carried out at several Polish and Ukrainian universities, in a group of students from several faculties. Ten values and forty norms of social life were assessed twice on a six-point scale. The respondents were first asked to indicate to what extent they considered certain values of social life as personally important and how they influenced their lives in various social situations. Then, they had to assess to what extent the given norms are noticed in their environment and are present in contemporary social life. The research report contains the results of the exploration of only a part of the study cohort, 272 students of pedagogy from Polish universities and 91 students from pedagogical universities in Ukraine. The obtained results were additionally compared with those obtained three decades earlier in a group of students of the same faculty.

The aim of this study was to develop a Political Elite Perception (PEP) Questionnaire with an exploratory mixed research design and to determine university students’ perceptions of university of political elites. At the qualitative stage of the study, a qualitative questionnaire was applied among university students (n = 160). The analysis of the qualitative data revealed that university students’ perceptions of political elites were grouped in seven main categories (intellectual capacity, political values, democratic attitude, personal traits, talents, power/influence, and interaction with the public/public benefits), and the questionnaire items were determined based on these categories. At the quantitative stage of the research, statistical analyses were conducted on the questionnaire that was applied to 383 university students. The study findings demonstrated that, according to the university students, the personal traits of political elites included charisma, courage, and self-confidence, but they also emphasized that political elites were intellectually inadequate, impartial, uncriticizable, unempathetic and non-compromising, and described the political elites as non-democratic.

Identity and attitudes of academic youth – a Polish-Czech comparative study

The article is a report on comparative studies carried out in the PolishCzech borderland in 2022–2023 among pedagogy students of Polish and Czech universities. The research was placed in the objectivist paradigm and the survey method was applied. The study was aimed at determining the sense of identity of young people, at learning about values, attitudes towards other nations and types of intergroup interactions taking place in the borderland. In order to check whether there are statistically significant differences between the groups in the responses to individual questions, the Mann-Whitney U test was used. In the context of the obtained results, it can be concluded that academic youth from the Polish and Czech parts of the borderland attribute significant importance to belonging to one biological species inhabiting the earth (no statistically significant differences between groups). Polish youth are similar to their peers living in the Czech Republic. The similarities pertain to identification in the system: person – gender – nationality, to positive attitude towards other nations and to values. There are statistically significant differences between the two cohorts in their attitudes towards individual nations and in their assessment of the types of social interactions occurring in the borderland. The specificity and differences have their sources in the sociocultural, political and economic situation of the country in which the young live and in the educational system to which they have been subjected. The future is a never-ending project that is constantly changing. Borderland research is the analysis of contexts in which the construction of the vision and the use of the realities of the existing social space take place. Research on academic youth provides information not only about its condition and the image of contemporary borderland, but also about its desired shape.