The Institute for Sociology, Centre for Social Sciences is the leading research institution in Hungary, successor of the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS), founded in 1963. Its major mission is to explore and analyse the social processes affecting the long term wellbeing of Hungarian citizens through methods of international standards. The researchers of the institute share the basic values of 21st century Euro-Atlantic civilisation: maintaining democracy, and aiming at the universal protection of basic human rights.
The tasks of the institute’s researchers include implementing their research projects through intensive communication with the international academic communities of their fields; at the same time, aiming at presenting to the general public their results that can directly be utilised in shaping social policies.
The institute has been working in a structure based on three research departments:
- At the Research Department for Families and Social Relations, internationally recognised research is carried out in a field with a long tradition in Hungary, complemented by research outcomes of socio-political relevance.
- The Research Department for Social and Public Policy focuses on social inequalities and their representations. The members of the department conduct internationally embedded research on class, ethnicity, gender, cultural and related policies, state institutions and social policies in Hungarian and international contexts.
- Researchers at the Research Department for Social Integration and Inequalities examine the income, spatial and value stratification trends of contemporary Hungarian society, the impact of certain social policy issues on stratification and wellbeing in an international context. The goal of their work is, besides internationally acknowledged basic research results, to provide the general public and government actors with directly utilisable information.
Research streams have been working with a narrower focus, namely:
- Families and gender
- Medical sociology, health policy
- Studies on memory, culture, and values
- Network analysis, big data
- Qualitative sociological methods
- Social integration
- Social inequalities and public policy
- Urban and environmental research
The research streams are labels attached to researchers and research projects rather than separate teams, in order to serve the overview of the institute’s manifold activities, and help the international communication of the research projects. Several researchers and projects are connected to more than one research streams.
Over two dozens of basic and applied research programmes are going on at the institute (partly financed by outside funders), three of which are of special importance:
- the comprehensive research programme promising a novel approach to the study of social integration: Integration and disintegration processes in Hungarian society (funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund);
- the archiving and cataloguing programme aiming at rescuing and recycling the qualitative data that accumulated in Hungarian social sciences during the past five decades, and the dissemination of various social science researches of the recent past and present (Voices of the 20th century, funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund and HAS); and
- coordinating the Hungarian part of the European Social Survey in partnership with the Institute for Political Science (funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund and HAS).
Our colleagues edit and the Institute for Sociology publishes the open-access, peer-reviewed online quarterly socio.hu publishing scientific papers in Hungarian and English.