ABSTRACT
The first half of this chapter—which discusses the theoretical rationale and research design of the comparative study of Poland and Ukraine—is mainly based on my research-grant proposal to the National Science Foundation, the text of which was subsequently modified and published in two versions. One (Kohn, Słomczynski, Janicka, Khmelko, Mach, Paniotto, and Zaborowski 1992a), which was intended for an international audience of specialists in cross-national comparative research, emphasizes the crossnational comparative focus of the research; the other (Kohn, Słomczynski, Janicka, Mach, and Zaborowski 1992b), which was intended for a Polish readership, emphasizes the historical comparison of Poland in 1978 and 1992. My grant proposal and both papers grew out of the many planning sessions of the collaborators in the overall project (all the people listed above as coauthors of Kohn et al. 1992a ), and benefitted considerably from an incisive critique by Carmi Schooler and from an informal seminar discussion by the graduate students of the Department of Sociology of the Johns Hopkins University. The second half of this chapter—which describes the research design and the practical implementation of this design that my collaborators and I developed in our comparative study of Poland and Ukraine—is based in part on the grant proposal and in part on discussions of these issues in subsequent papers that presented the findings of the crosssectional analyses (Kohn et al. 1997; 2000; and 2002).
