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The aim of this paper is to perform a sociological and pastoral analysis of the religiousness of young people in Poland, which is a challenge to Catholic education. The authors analyse this issue based on the empirical study conducted in 2019 and 2020. The study employed an online survey questionnaire. The study included 1171 people, students in grades 7 and 8 of primary schools and of secondary schools in the Małopolskie and Podkarpackie Voivodships in Poland. The paper focuses on young people's self-declarations concerning: the religion they profess, faith, affiliation with a religious community, a bond to the community, the respondents' and their parents' attending religious services, celebrations/masses and praying individually. It was regarded as important to determine the correlations between the self-declarations of affiliation with a religious community and self-declaration of the religion professed and between the self-declarations of faith and bond to a religious community and self-declaration of the religion professed. These issues are enriched with the respondents' opinions on religion as a school subject. They provide an insight into not only the respondents' religiousness but also a diagnosis of young people's attitudes towards religion as a school subject. They allow for conclusions to be drawn on Catholic education in the secularising society, especially with young people increasingly often quitting religious lessons in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of an original quantitative sociological study conducted in Autumn 2019 on a sample of 620 Polish migrants living in London, Oxford, and Swindon. The study was conducted using a groupadministered questionnaire. It was primarily to address the question of whether they intend to return to Poland and when. We identify some significant factors influencing their choices. Those are the length of stay in England, their financial situation, their knowledge of English, their ability to assimilate culturally, their relations to the families in Poland, homesickness, and better religious education of children. Religious issues, although mentioned, are less critical; however, a deeper statistical analysis allows to understand the religious background more broadly, to provide a clearer image of the respondents' deep motivations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates how birth order and gender jointly influence naming decisions among Polish parents. The impact of birth order on the choice of first names has been extensively documented in historical and anthropological studies worldwide, but it has been largely ignored in sociological research on contemporary Western countries. The study is based on a survey of 317 users of a Polish parenting forum devoted to first names and naming decisions. The names of the first-born and second-born children of the research participants are compared in terms of their popularity and traditionality, measured both objectively and subjectively, in regard to the subjective motives declared behind the naming choices. The findings show that, on the whole, the first-born children received more popular and more traditional names than the second-borns. However, when the gender of the children was figured in, the difference between the first-born and the second-born boys turned out statistically significant only in the dimension of traditionality, whereas between the first-born and the second-born girls, only in the dimension of popularity. In a within-family comparison, the names given to siblings were found to be fairly consistent in both dimensions, and the gender of the first child influenced the preferences for the second one, especially if the latter was a girl. Those results can be interpreted in the frame of different social expectations towards the genders, with a particular focus on gendered concepts of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]