Społeczne obrazy grup zawodowych. Analiza powiązań
Streszczenie
Analyses contained in this study constitute both an extension and criticism of the discussion of social images of social groups of peasants, clerks and workmen in the preceding study. When there is a question of social images of occupational groups – such as those of peasants, clerks and workmen – one has to remember that these images emerge as a result of scrutiny and interpretation of the so-called frequency lists, i.e. of the distributions of frequencies with which certain traits are assigned to these groups. So, a social image is created by the researcher – and though it is based on empirical data obtained from his respondents, it is still formed due to his insight into current ways of perception of the groups, due to his own imagination and ability to transform “individual” beliefs into “social” wholes. How much of the content of such images comes directly from the respondents, and how much from his own creation – should be at least roughly realized by the researcher. More particularly, in interpreting the data on the frequency lists one must not adopt a “stylistics of linkage” without justification and merely on the basis of one’s own intuition, i.e. one should not suggest that the traits appearing, for example, on the top positions, are durably interlinked in the social perception of occupational groups. The study demonstrates how to verify whether the “stylistics of linkage” is – or is not – empirically founded. This verification may embrace the linkage of traits appearing in the social image of one occupational group (internal perspective) – as well as the linkage of traits belonging to social images of different occupational groups (external perspective). The method of this verification consists in establishing – both in the internal and external perspective – what is the probability of appearance of one trait on the condition of appearance of another one in the replies of respondents, and in what cases the value of this probability is higher than the adopted level of significance, i.e. in which cases the “stylistics of linkage” rests on any empirical basis. A general typology of paired linkage of traits was presented due to which characterized were linkages of the traits making up the foreground (the ten top traits) and the background (the traits located on lower positions) of the social images of the groups of peasants, clerks and workmen. The traits and the links between them were presented using simple ideas of imagining and interpreting the structures, based on the graph theory.
The analysis revealed that, the cases in which the “stylistics of linkage” was empirically founded were extremely rare. For example, it turned out that some of the traits from among those having the top positions on the frequency lists, not only were not interlinked significantly, but were not interlinked at all. Taken up was the problem of explanation why some traits were strongly and others weakly interlinked and, more particularly, why certain traits did not appear jointly. A consideration was given to the close interweaving of the internal and external perspectives in the perception of different occupational groups.
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