The proposed research will be a three-year panel study of the impact of economic reforms on the well-being of families and individuals in Czechoslovakia. The research follows from a two-year pretest in Czechoslovakia. Theories about the transition from state socialism to capitalism sensitize us to the inequality that might emerge during the transition, as past research on stress-distress in this country sensitizes us to the connection between inequality and distress. To empirically establish the connection between the reforms, inequality and distress, we will combine macro information from logs of political and economic events especially concerning the disturbutional consequences of the reforms with data from panel members in the form of diaries and responses to questionnaires. A national sampling frame will be used to construct this multi-wave (1993, 1994 and 1995) panel of 625 Bohemian and Moravian families. With each wave of data collection, we will ask panel members 1) questions about the flow of economic reforms into their lives and other life events over the past year; 2) information pertinent to variables that possibly mediate/moderate the impact of economic reforms as life events on well-being; and 3) questions about their physical and psychological well-being as well as family relations. In all families, household heads will complete questionnaires and some will complete diaries; in married households, both husbands and wives will complete the research instruments. The data sets will enable us to document the effects of economic reforms on well-being in Czechoslovakia. We will model both direct effects of economic change as life events on health outcomes and indirect effects mediated/moderated through social support, psychological states, and personal characteristics. With this design, we will directly compare husbands and wives, and to a more modest extent, compare married and unmarried men and women. We will also be able to compare results in Czechoslovakia with those of NIMH-funded studies currently being done in the United States.
| Hraba, J; Lorenz, F O; Pechacova, Z et al. (1998) Education and health in the Czech Republic. J Health Soc Behav 39:295-316 |
| Hraba, J; Lorenz, F; Lee, G et al. (1996) Gender differences in health: evidence from the Czech Republic. Soc Sci Med 43:1443-51 |
