This is a study of the psychological dynamics of people in a society undergoing radical social change, analyzing longitudinal data from Ukraine. The data consist of face-to-face interviews conducted with a representative sample of men and women in the urban labor force of that country, initially surveyed in 1992-1993, then re-interviewed during the spring and summer of 1996. The initial survey, conducted with representative samples of the adult populations of the urban areas of Poland and Ukraine, was designed to learn whether the relationships between social structure and personality found in earlier studies of Poland (when it was socialist), the United States, and Japan still obtained in Poland, and obtained in Ukraine, under the conditions of radical social change then being experienced in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. By 1992, a dramatic change had already taken place in Poland in the relationship between social structure and a sense of well-being or distress. Much the same process appeared to be underway in Ukraine at that time, but was not nearly so far along. The Ukrainian collaborators in this research conducted a full-scale follow-up survey of those respondents who in 1992-1993 were in the labor force, i.e., were either employed 15 or more hours per week or were unemployed and seeking employment. These data will make it possible to do a thoroughgoing longitudinal analysis of the psychological dynamics of radical social change from an early period of the transformation of the Ukrainian economy well into that transformation. Ukraine is an interesting case not merely because it is the second most populous fragment of the former Soviet Union, but also because the changes observed in Poland may be occurring at a different pace and possibly with different outcomes in Ukraine.
