The idea of being active, healthy, happy and independent as long as is possible is strongly promo... more The idea of being active, healthy, happy and independent as long as is possible is strongly promoted in public discourse and in aging policies. Starting from the idea of investigating the serious leisure practices of the elderly, I sought to develop a qualitative research that captures perceptions and normative attitudes regarding the perceived and lived experience of aging. The study offers insights into the socially constructed nature of successful aging, by critically exploring the relation between the practice of Tai-Chi, considered a serious leisure activity among older adults, and the neoliberal ideology. During my fieldwork I conducted 14 in-depth semi-structured interviews and I have analyzed a specific typology of subjects - ‘healthy and somewhat wealthy’ as one of the respondents described himself - motivated by the fact that this category of the elderly is much more likely to internalize and promote neoliberal ideology. The goal of my fieldwork research was to determine h...
The present study has been carried out within the framework of the project "United Networks.... more The present study has been carried out within the framework of the project "United Networks. Integrated initiative for the social inclusion of marginalized communities" led by the Caritas – Social Work Organization Alba-Iulia in partnership with the Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, the Mures, Harghita, and Covasna County Directorates for Social Assistance and Child Protection, and Caritas Norway between May 2015 and December 2016.<br> Our primary purpose is methodological: to construct two complementary macro-level indexes (an index of housing deprivation and an index of low income and unemployment), and compare them with similar, earlier indexes such as the index of community development (Sandu, 2000) and the index of local-level deprivation elaborated by Teșliuc, Grigoraș és Stănculescu (2016). We confront the statistical portraits drawn by these indexes with the results of qualitative fieldwork consisting of interviews with mayors, school principles, social wo...
Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia, 2015
The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits o... more The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits of using official data (collected and reported by state-institutions) in order to shed light on consequences of uneven development and measure area deprivation in present-day Romania. Our argumentation is based on a quantitative inquiry at the level of rural communes and small-towns from three counties located in the historical region of Transylvania. It presents the reasons for choosing certain statistical indicators, the construction of composite indexes and the profiles of localities according to their values. We explore the statistical correlations between our indexes and the poverty rates measured for 2002 (CASPIS, 2004), as well as the Local Human Development Index proposed by Sandu (2011) and revised by the World Bank (2014). Unlike other poverty-mapping inquiries, our goal was not to identify compact, segregated and severely impoverished settlements, but to measure the extent of m...
The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits o... more The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits of using official data (collected and reported by state-institutions) in order to shed light on consequences of uneven development and measure area deprivation in present-day Romania. Our argumentation is based on a quantitative inquiry at the level of rural communes and small-towns from three counties located in the historical region of Transylvania. It presents the reasons for choosing certain statistical indicators, the construction of composite indexes and the profiles of localities according to their values. We explore the statistical correlations between our indexes and the poverty rates measured for 2002 (CASPIS, 2004), as well as the Local Human Development Index proposed by Sandu (2011) and revised by the World Bank (2014). Unlike other poverty-mapping inquiries, our goal was not to identify compact, segregated and severely impoverished settlements, but to measure the extent of material deprivation at the level of the entire administrative unit. In this way, we refrained from seeing poverty as the problem of a socially (and sometimes spatially) marginalized settlement, and instead defined poverty as a problem of the entire local community, that should be addressed by the local community as a whole. Our data reveals that, after controlling for poverty and local resources, the share of the Roma ethnic minority is a strong statistical predictor of registered unemployment, however, it does not correlate with the frequency of granting social assistance benefits. Introduction 4 The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits of using official data (collected and reported by state-institutions) in order to shed light on unequal development and measure area deprivation in present-day Romania. We present the reasons for choosing certain statistical indicators that local authorities regularly (yet not publicly) report at the level of localities, the construction of composite indexes based on these indicators and the profiles of rural communes (administrative unites comprising one or several villages) and small-towns (with less than 20,000 inhabitants) according to these indexes 5. Unlike other poverty-mapping inquiries, our goal was not to identify compact, segregated and severely impoverished settlements (Sandu, 2005; Fleck and Rughiniș, 2008; Vincze, 2013; Vincze and Hossu, 2014), but to measure the extent of material deprivation at the level of the administrative unit as a whole. In this way, we refrained from seeing poverty as the problem of a socially (and sometimes spatially) marginalized settlement, and instead defined poverty as a problem of the entire local community, that should be addressed by the local community as a whole. Our argumentation is based on a quantitative inquiry at the level of rural communes and small-towns from three counties from Transylvania, situated in the central part of Romania and partly corresponding to the historical region of Szeklerland (Székelyföld in Hungarian and Ținutul Secuiesc in Romanian): Mureș (Maros), Harghita (Hargita) and Covasna (Kovászna). Although in terms of ethnic distribution these three counties have a specific profile, with considerably larger shares of the Hungarian population 6 , in terms of economic and labour force indicators they largely resemble the central-region of the country and Romania
The idea of being active, healthy, happy and independent as long as is possible is strongly promo... more The idea of being active, healthy, happy and independent as long as is possible is strongly promoted in public discourse and in aging policies. Starting from the idea of investigating the serious leisure practices of the elderly, I sought to develop a qualitative research that captures perceptions and normative attitudes regarding the perceived and lived experience of aging. The study offers insights into the socially constructed nature of successful aging, by critically exploring the relation between the practice of Tai-Chi, considered a serious leisure activity among older adults, and the neoliberal ideology. During my fieldwork I conducted 14 in-depth semi-structured interviews and I have analyzed a specific typology of subjects - ‘healthy and somewhat wealthy’ as one of the respondents described himself - motivated by the fact that this category of the elderly is much more likely to internalize and promote neoliberal ideology. The goal of my fieldwork research was to determine h...
The present study has been carried out within the framework of the project "United Networks.... more The present study has been carried out within the framework of the project "United Networks. Integrated initiative for the social inclusion of marginalized communities" led by the Caritas – Social Work Organization Alba-Iulia in partnership with the Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, the Mures, Harghita, and Covasna County Directorates for Social Assistance and Child Protection, and Caritas Norway between May 2015 and December 2016.<br> Our primary purpose is methodological: to construct two complementary macro-level indexes (an index of housing deprivation and an index of low income and unemployment), and compare them with similar, earlier indexes such as the index of community development (Sandu, 2000) and the index of local-level deprivation elaborated by Teșliuc, Grigoraș és Stănculescu (2016). We confront the statistical portraits drawn by these indexes with the results of qualitative fieldwork consisting of interviews with mayors, school principles, social wo...
Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia, 2015
The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits o... more The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits of using official data (collected and reported by state-institutions) in order to shed light on consequences of uneven development and measure area deprivation in present-day Romania. Our argumentation is based on a quantitative inquiry at the level of rural communes and small-towns from three counties located in the historical region of Transylvania. It presents the reasons for choosing certain statistical indicators, the construction of composite indexes and the profiles of localities according to their values. We explore the statistical correlations between our indexes and the poverty rates measured for 2002 (CASPIS, 2004), as well as the Local Human Development Index proposed by Sandu (2011) and revised by the World Bank (2014). Unlike other poverty-mapping inquiries, our goal was not to identify compact, segregated and severely impoverished settlements, but to measure the extent of m...
The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits o... more The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits of using official data (collected and reported by state-institutions) in order to shed light on consequences of uneven development and measure area deprivation in present-day Romania. Our argumentation is based on a quantitative inquiry at the level of rural communes and small-towns from three counties located in the historical region of Transylvania. It presents the reasons for choosing certain statistical indicators, the construction of composite indexes and the profiles of localities according to their values. We explore the statistical correlations between our indexes and the poverty rates measured for 2002 (CASPIS, 2004), as well as the Local Human Development Index proposed by Sandu (2011) and revised by the World Bank (2014). Unlike other poverty-mapping inquiries, our goal was not to identify compact, segregated and severely impoverished settlements, but to measure the extent of material deprivation at the level of the entire administrative unit. In this way, we refrained from seeing poverty as the problem of a socially (and sometimes spatially) marginalized settlement, and instead defined poverty as a problem of the entire local community, that should be addressed by the local community as a whole. Our data reveals that, after controlling for poverty and local resources, the share of the Roma ethnic minority is a strong statistical predictor of registered unemployment, however, it does not correlate with the frequency of granting social assistance benefits. Introduction 4 The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits of using official data (collected and reported by state-institutions) in order to shed light on unequal development and measure area deprivation in present-day Romania. We present the reasons for choosing certain statistical indicators that local authorities regularly (yet not publicly) report at the level of localities, the construction of composite indexes based on these indicators and the profiles of rural communes (administrative unites comprising one or several villages) and small-towns (with less than 20,000 inhabitants) according to these indexes 5. Unlike other poverty-mapping inquiries, our goal was not to identify compact, segregated and severely impoverished settlements (Sandu, 2005; Fleck and Rughiniș, 2008; Vincze, 2013; Vincze and Hossu, 2014), but to measure the extent of material deprivation at the level of the administrative unit as a whole. In this way, we refrained from seeing poverty as the problem of a socially (and sometimes spatially) marginalized settlement, and instead defined poverty as a problem of the entire local community, that should be addressed by the local community as a whole. Our argumentation is based on a quantitative inquiry at the level of rural communes and small-towns from three counties from Transylvania, situated in the central part of Romania and partly corresponding to the historical region of Szeklerland (Székelyföld in Hungarian and Ținutul Secuiesc in Romanian): Mureș (Maros), Harghita (Hargita) and Covasna (Kovászna). Although in terms of ethnic distribution these three counties have a specific profile, with considerably larger shares of the Hungarian population 6 , in terms of economic and labour force indicators they largely resemble the central-region of the country and Romania
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Papers by Andrada Tobias