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The article presents estimates of the reliability of measurement in the Czech surveys carried out in the EU-SILC international longitudinal research project. The reliability estimates were obtained using the Quasi Simplex Model (QSM), which has never before been used in Czech research. An analysis was carried out on all the items in the EU-SILC questionnaire that fulfi lled the criteria for the QSM analysis: PH010, the item that asks respondents about their subjective health, HS120, the item that asks about the household's fi nancial situation, and HS130, which asks what the minimum suffi cient income of a household is. The analysis drew on all available data from Czech EU-SILC surveys, that is, data from fi ve rotating panel surveys carried out between 2005 and 2012. The QSM analysis showed that for the selected items EU-SILC data are highly reliable; the estimated reliability of each item was around 0.8, for HS130 it was even above 0.9. The steadiness of the results was confi rmed by the high consistency of the reliability estimates across all the panels. A small difference was observed between the reliability of data collected using the PAPI mode and data collected using CAPI. Given the attributes of the QSM model, however, it was impossible to test statistically whether the reliability of PAPI and CAPI data differ signifi cantly.

This study focuses on the approaches used by Czech social workers operating in the field of child protection to resolve parental conflicts and looks specifically at their inclination to employ defensive practice. Defensive practice involves prioritising regulations and prescribed rules over the interests of clients, i.e. parents and children. The aim of this study is to verify, with the help of a questionnaire, the theoretical connections between the use of defensive practice and several factors that represent working conditions and external pressures. The research indicates that the factors connected with the use of defensive practice to deal with parental conflicts have the opposite effect in the Czech Republic that that observed in international studies or have no influence whatsoever. Child protection social workers who emphasise compliance regard their working conditions as favourable and have somewhat conservative attitudes and beliefs. The authors' interpretation of the findings is that the emphasis on regulations in Czech child protection is not a defensive reaction to threatening working conditions, but an expression of loyalty to an organisation that offers them a pleasant work environment where they need not be afraid of any potential failures or consequences of their decisions. They also propose redefining Czech defensive practice by placing less emphasis on compliance as a reaction to unfavourable working conditions.

The aim of this article is to present a trend in research on measurement error in survey data and to suggest some problematic aspects of this approach. The article describes the Multitrait Multimethod experimental design and its modifi cation into a 2 Split-ballot Multitrait Multimethod (2 SB MTMM), which is used for experimental data collection in the European Social Survey. The text shows how to analyze 2 SB MTMM data to obtain estimates of construct validity, reliability and common method variance for a single questionnaire item, and how to make use of these estimates. It also points to some problems encountered in 2 SB MTMM data analysis.