ISJP - International Social Justice Project
Department of Social Sciences
Social Research and Methods
The ISJP is an international collaborative research project in which social scientists from twelve countries join to study popular beliefs and attitudes on social, economic and political justice. Two large-scale opinion surveys were fielded in all twelve countries in 1991 and in six countries in 1996. The 1991 survey was carried out in Russia, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Germany (eastern and western), the United States, Great Britain, The Netherlands, and Japan. Participants of the 1996 survey, replicating most of the questions from 1991, were Russia, Estonia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Germany. In 2000 a second replication was carried out in Germany where part of the sample was used as the first wave of a three-wave panel study, with twelve months measurement intervals, to test the stability of justice beliefs over time. In 2006, the fourth German ISJP study (ISJP4) was conducted, as were projects in other countries replicating the ISJP (Israel, Chile, Czech Republic and Hungary). In ISJP4, a particular focus is on the comparative study of intergenerational justice issues.
This is the website of the German ISJP Study Group. Headed by Bernd Wegener, the group constituted itself at the University of Heidelberg in 1991 and moved to Humboldt University, Berlin, in 1993, where it collaborates with the Interdisciplinary Social Justice Research Group (ISGF) that was established in 1998. It is also closely connected to the former Center for Justice Research (ZfG) at the University of Potsdam and the International Society for Justice Research (ISJR). In 2006, August 2-5, the biannual meeting of that society, the 11th International Social Justice Conference, was held at Humboldt University (see the conference homepage at isjr2006.org).
The original coordinator of the international ISJP was David Mason at Butler University, Indianapolis. Visit also the Butler ISJP site to find listings of the participating international research teams and publications from these sources. In 2000, when ISJP3 was fielded, the international ISJP secretariat moved to Humboldt University, Berlin.
Results of the 1991 survey are reported in Social Justice and Political Change: Public Opinion in Capitalist and Post-Communist States, edited by James R. Kluegel, David S. Mason and Bernd Wegener and published by Aldine deGruyter in 1995. Results of the 1991-1996 trend analyses are published in David S. Mason and James R. Kluegel (eds.) with Ludmila Khakhulina, Petr Mateju, Antal Orkeny, Alexander Stoyanov, Bernd Wegener, Marketing Democracy: Changing Opinion About Inequality and Politics in East Central Europe (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), and in Bernd Wegener (ed.), Social Justice Beliefs in Transition: Eastern and Central Europe 1991-1996, a Special Issue of Social Justice Research, vol. 13, 2000.
The 1991 international dataset has been deposited with the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan (#06705) and at the GESIS Archive in Cologne, Germany, where it is accessible to other scholars. The complete 1991-2006 trend dataset was given to GESIS in 2014 (#ZA3522 #ZA4409; see the codebook of the merged dataset). The merged codebook including the German studies of 2000 and 2006 is available on request.
The ISJP has been supported by grants from the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, the National Science Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and funding agencies in each of the countries involved in the project. The funding and contact information of the German ISJP Study Group is given below.
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), 1991-2007
(WE 1019/3-2, 1019/3-3, 1019/9-1, 1019/9-2, 1019/11-1, 1019/11-2, 1019/13-1)
PI: Bernd Wegener
Staff: Bodo Lippl; Kai Mühleck; Jean-Yves Gerlitz; Percy Scheller; Markus Schrenker; Ingolf Böttcher; Joscha Legewie; Simone Schneider
Contact:
Humboldt University of Berlin
Institute of Social Sciences
Unter den Linden 6
D-10099 Berlin
Phone: +49-30-2093-4434
Fax: +49-30-2093-4430
E-Mail: info@isjp.de