The project is financed by the National Science Centre within the OPUS Programme.

The scientific objective of this project is to conduct a third turn of the study performed already in June, 1988 and repeated in November, 1998. The results were presented successively in the following books: “Intimate and Stranger” (Nowicka: 1990) and “On the threshold of the open world” (Nowicka and Łodziński: 2001). The need to repeat this research is due to the urgent importance of the wave of migration to Europe (commonly referred to as “migration crisis”) and the vast public discussions related to this topic in our country.

The quantitative part of the research (survey) will repeat the basic framework of research from the previous years. The research will be based on the reiteration of the questionnaire elaborated by the team and a proofread (and still checking up) questionnaire with only changes and additions resulting from changes in the social reality in Poland during last 30 years.

The second part of the study will be a qualitative research, which will focus on attitudes towards “stranger” and “other” in Polish society. The study as a whole is expected to provide empirical data for assessing the transformation of attitudes and opinions of the Polish society in terms of its self-definition (concept of Polishness) and the functioning of socially recognized ethnic boundaries regarding the cultural and physical “other”.

The result of the study will be the diagnosis of the long-term transformation of Polish society regarding diversity and its own identity, which would be possible through a comparative perspective of the research from the years 1988, 1998 and 2017. In addition, the publication of results will have an educational and persuasive effect, providing competent data into the public debates.