The Polish Panel Survey POLPAN provides data infrastructure to analyze the dynamics of social inequality from a life-course perspective. Historical events shape the study’s research design. In 1987–1988, 5,817 randomly sampled men and women aged 21–65 are interviewed in what is still state socialist Poland. Soon after, their lives are upended by the profound transformations that the anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe triggered. To understand how people transition to the emerging social structure, close to half of the respondents are re-interviewed in 1993. This sample serves as a panel that we follow every 5 years, most recently in 2018. Since 1998, POLPAN waves feature renewal samples of the youngest cohort that become part of the panel. Participants are interviewed face-to-face on a wide range of topics, including educational and occupational careers, psychological functioning, physical and mental health, political behaviours, and social attitudes. These topics address POLPAN’s overarching research problem, how does social position influence individual biographies and social networks, and how do individual choices that peoples’ biographies and networks reflect, in turn influence their later social standing. A multi-dimensional approach to data quality informs POLPAN methodology and the decision to publicly share the project’s products, including datasets and analytic tools.

Occupational mobility patterns are assumed to be an accurate description of the process of social structuration. By a canonical analysis of occupational mobility tables from nine countries an attempt is made to reveal dominant patterns of intergenerational movements. Our findings show that, as indexed by mobility patterns, basic aspects of social structuration are cross-nationally invariant. These are: (i) a sharp distinction between farm and non-farm occupations; (ii) a socioeconomic hierarchy of non-agricultural categories; (iii) a distinctive position of the occupational elite; (iv) a white-collar/blue-collar division; (v) a distinctive location of non-farm proprietors. The results call in question the traditional thesis claiming the strong prevalence of the socioeconomic status dimension in social space.THEORY

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Inequalities in education are so deeply embedded in social stratification that even far-reaching school reforms are not able to weaken the influence of social origin on school achievements. The aim of this article is to verify whether the education reform, which in Poland established a new type of 3-year lower secondary school (gimnazjum), simultaneously equalised the chances of students from different social backgrounds at the transition from lower to upper secondary school. All hypotheses were tested using PISA data from the years 2000-2012, which covered the period before and after school reform in Poland. In case of the first hypothesis, which concerned changes in the impact of social origin on student's performance in the last year of the new schools, i.e. a year before transition to upper secondary school, PISA data clearly demonstrated that after the reform, there was no significant decrease in correlations between socio-economic status of students and their results in three PISA domains: mathematics, reading and science. In case of the second hypothesis, which was directly focused on social selections to upper secondary schools, PISA data did not confirm that anything changed in this respect after the reform. The third hypotheses addresses the problem of the growing differences among schools in terms of their performance. During the fifteen years since the reform, new schools started to diversify more and more, especially in large cities. PISA demonstrates, however, that this diversification did not perpetuate social inequalities, but rather resulted from competition among schools in the quality of instruction. The latter result was supported by PISA data from eight European countries where students, as in Poland, attend schools which are not divided into tracks. Between 2003 and 2012, growing differences among schools was observed in most of these countries, but in none of them was it accompanied by growing inequalities in education.