ABSTRACT
As in the Soviet period, official sources, including State statistical sources, offer extremely limited data on social activity. They cover information on numbers of unemployed people, on living standards, and on the proportion of the population below the poverty line. The use of a large number of closed questions in the interviews naturally meant that the questions themselves had to be of high quality. The interviewers then got in touch with the respondents by telephone or home visit and, on receipt of agreement to co-operate, the respondents were interviewed in their own homes. The respondents were fairly evenly distributed between sectors, with a slight prevalence of those from the defence industry; they had been made redundant mainly from large state or privatised enterprises. The status of a person who had got into circumstances where their employment was under threat was apparently linked to the size of the enterprise worked at.
