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The thematically oriented biographical interview (TOBI) is a research tool used frequently in contemporary qualitative research. Compared to other interviewing techniques, its main advantage is its combination of a thematic focus and sensitivity to the perspective of the interviewee. The authors demonstrate that TOBI is made up of several constituents: first, it is a speech infrastructure (comprising a conversational and a narrative component), and second, it encompasses three kinds of relevance (biographical relevance, identity relevance and specific thematic relevance). The main part of the article is devoted to an analysis of the types and forms of relevance that occur in the corpus of oral history biographical interviews. The analysis shows that, contrary to the common effort of researchers to increase the significance of a respondent's testimony by emphasising the specific thematic relevance, the biographical and identity relevances are equally important for successfully capturing the actor's perspective and smoothly conducting a TOBI. In their explication of relevance and its forms the authors draw on the theory of relevance developed by Alfred Schütz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to perform a first exploratory analysis of the legislative voting structure in the Czech Senate compared to the Chamber of Deputies in 1998-2010. It focuses on the determinants of voting unity of parliamentary party groups measured using the Rice index and on the determinants of the composition of legislative coalitions measured as the relative frequency of majorities formed by two parliamentary party groups voting together. The authors find that patterns of government coalitions are present in both the Senate as and the Chamber of Deputies: senatorial groups of government parties vote more uniformly and more often together than do opposition party groups. The Senate is also less ideological and more consensual than the Chamber of Deputies: a similar ideological profile of two parties in the Senate is a weaker determinant of their senatorial groups voting together. Voting majorities are in general much broader in the Senate than in the Chamber of Deputies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors examine the production of television news by a public service broadcaster, Czech Television. The aim is to understand the way in which reporters and their colleagues 'make the news'. Ethnomethodologically informed ethnography is used to analyse cooperation among TV professionals and make visible the everyday, routine, and situated practices with which they perform their tasks. The authors study how practitioners perform their work in consideration of their colleagues' work, that is, with an awareness of a common aim. They argue that the professional system of relevances of newsmakers is structured by socially established and shared knowledge of the genre specifics of television news reports. The authors describe the genre structure of a standard television news report from a praxeological perspective, and they show how reporters, camera operators, sound technicians, editors, and others mutually collaborate to create a shared understanding of the system of genre norms. The article devotes particular attention to a key component of reporting work: the organisation and filming of interviews with respondents. The analysis demonstrates that interviews with respondents function as an auxiliary television news genre and that the system of relevances in this case is derived from the television news report as a superordinate genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research work in the field of the sociology of education has led us to the question of the overall state of sociological disciplines relating to these questions and problems of youth in the Czech Republic since 1990. We believe that it is still too early to undertake a deeper analysis and overall assessment of the development of Czech sociology of upbringing. In this initial phase we wish to present a preliminary mapping of the facts of the situation. It is therefore necessary to pose several questions: What is the current institutional basis of the discipline? What has been published in this area? What themes have been the subject of research? Where are new interdisciplinary links between the sociology of upbringing and youth and other disciplines (especially social education) emerging? In conclusion we appeal to readers for further information, ideas and opinions on this theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]