Current academic projects

Note: all the bellow projects represent broad areas of interest, that I do particularize in much more narrow short-time projects, most of them cross-cultural and/or longitudinal, as well as combining two or more of the listed research interests.

ONGOING PROJECTS

Changing values and behaviors under the impact of migration

Personal long-run project, developed mainly within the framework of the Romanian Group for Studying Social Values. I am interested in the contextual effects on value formation and change. International migration can be used as natural experiment to see if migrants do change due to institutionalization effects or they stick to their values, attitudes, and behaviors learned during early socialization. Check the page of our MigVaSo project for more details.

Life satisfaction and elections

Developed within the context of the “Romanian election studies” project, coordinated by Mircea Comşa. My personal interest relates to: 1) the changes of life satisfaction levels (and structure) during the election process; and 2) the extent to which Romanian 'stayers' (those who do not migrate), exposed to contact with emigrated friends and relatives, take through contagion values, attitudes and behaviours related to political participation in the countries where their peers migrated.

RECURRING PROJECTS

Social capital and social relations

Long-run project. I have published several papers/book-chapters on the topic, as well as a monograph book (Lumen, 2010). Currently I am mainly interested to research the determinants of social capital, particularly the bridging form, and to explain the variations between countries, and (as a next step) between regions within European countries.

Studying the dynamics of higher education systems

Another long-run project. I look to various aspects of the higher education systems, mainly in Europe, with a special focus on Romania. There are several comparative and national projects in which I was involved and which increased my interest related to massification, as part of the (post)modernization processes. Massification/expansion of higher education brings with it important transformations of the education systems, particularly (but not only!) of  the unversities. Changing patterns of inequality, transforming the role of PhD, relations between teaching and research, connection to the labor market, and impact to the whole society are my main points of interest.

Note: all the above projects represent broad areas of interest, that I do particularize in much more narrow short-time projects, most of them cross-cultural and/or longitudinal, as well as combining two or more of the listed research interests.