Social Report 2019 - Előszó

The Hungarian Social Report 2019 forms part of the long-standing tradition of social reporting in Europe. As Noll and Berger (2014: 9) emphasize, social reports and social monitoring activities are aimed at ‘regular monitoring and analysis of as well as reporting on the living conditions and well-being of the population and their changes over time’. By generating quantitative information and empirically based analytical knowledge on well-being and progress in a society (or group of societies), social reporting can contribute to better-informed evidence-based policy making. While social monitoring is about the periodic production of carefully developed indicators and indicator systems, social reporting goes beyond this to incorporate analysis, interpretation and evaluation of trends (Noll, 2004: 163). The Hungarian Social Report first appeared in 1990 (Andorka et al., 1990a; 1990b). Its aim was to join the already existing reporting traditions of France, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom (to mention just a few of the most prominent reporting countries). Rudolf Andorka, Tamás Kolosi and György Vukovich, the editors of the first edition, set the series goal of painting as complete a picture as possible of Hungarian society. Theirs was the first social report published in a post-socialist Eastern European country. Since then, a Social Report has been published every two years by TÁRKI Social Research Institute (for the most recent one, see Kolosi and Tóth, 2018) – and with this frequency it is certainly among the leaders on the international social reporting scene. The Hungarian Social Report series is envisaged as a collection of analytical chapters covering several domains, such as social structure, mobility, elements of well-being, values and attitudes, and addressing specific issues and problems in particular years. As such, it belongs to a tradition that also provides evaluation and interpretation of social trends: it aims to go beyond data, to offer better information for political decision making on the one hand, and on the other to provide the general reader with a better idea of social trends. As has been mentioned, a Hungarian edition has appeared every two years since 1990. But an English edition is published much less frequently: in 1990, 1998 and 2004 (see Kolosi et al., 2004).