Natalia Panina’s sociology: theory, research, professional ethics

Abstract

The article focuses on the life and legacy of an outstanding Ukrainian sociologist, Doctor of Sciences in Sociology Natalia Panina (1949–2006). She was a leading expert within Ukraine in a number of areas determining the development of national sociological science and relating to the study of important social phenomena such as social adaptation, societal transformation and political culture. She also provided organizational and methodological support to the monitoring and epidemiological studies. N. Panina adapted a number of well-known Western questionnaires for measuring anxiety, anomie, social cynicism, etc. and applied these tools to mass surveys. In addition, Panina’s works on the issues of interethnic tolerance in Ukraine gained extraordinary resonance. She was the first to set out principles for designing a quality sociological test which should be used in mass surveys. In 1992, while working at the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, N. Panina started developing a project for monitoring social changes in Ukrainian society and testing the methodology related to this project. With the passage of time, the monitoring grew into the main source of systematic sociological information for the academic community, authorities and general public of Ukraine. The findings from the monitoring survey supervised by N. Panina all the time have served as a basis for numerous monographs, academic papers and journalistic articles. In 2014, this project was awarded the State Prize in Science and Technology. N. Panina participated in many cross-national research projects, successfully collaborating with social scientists from the Institutes of Sociology of the Polish and Hungarian Academies of Sciences, the Universities of London and Cambridge, Hartford, Georgetown and New York (in Stony Brook) Universities, the University of Jerusalem, as well as with a number of academic institutions in Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, France and Slovakia. Her articles and monograph chapters were published in each of these countries. For many years, N. Panina was the Head of the Commission on Professional Ethics of the Sociological Association of Ukraine. She managed the preparation of the Code of Professional Ethics for Sociologists, approved in 2004 at the Congress of the Sociological Association of Ukraine.