The Center for Urban and Regional Sociology (CURS) is a private research and marketing agency that has a national network of approximately 560 interviewers.
The issues currently addressed by CURS’ research include: political behaviour; attitudes and perceptions on the present economic, political and social changes; inter-ethnic relations; media and cultural consumption; consumer behaviour, product testing; advertising monitoring and impact. The topics are approached by both quantitative and qualitative methodologies.
The research topics include:
- Social indicators of habitat, setting indicators for measuring dwelling quality, environment quality, stock of dwellings and dwelling’ aspirations
- Social Map of Romania (on-going research). Up to now the following fields have been considered: housing, demography, urbanisation, social structure, inter-ethnic relations, and political behaviour of the population
- Social impact of privatisation: assessing positive and negative social consequences of mass privatisation on the level of state owned enterprises involved and population perception of economic changes
- Audience research: estimating the main audience indicators of TV/ radio stations and newspapers: ratings, market share, reach, average exposure, performance of TV speakers and moderators, audience profiles, etc.
- Market research studying effective and potential demand for certain products, as well as patterns of shopping behaviour for each consumer profile (market-segmentation)
- Study of the private agriculture in Romania, focusing on the re-organisation of the agriculture on three levels: individual household, agriculture association and community (representative samples of 120 villages and 360 agriculture association)
- Studies on corruption and public sector performance: surveys on households, enterprises and public officials
- Life styles and inter-ethnic relations in Romania, different scales of evaluation (including Bogardus scale, for the first time on a representative sample in Romania) have been used and different kinds of behaviour (consuming, leisure time etc.) measured
- Romanian village revisited, new sociological insights in the life of the villages studied by the Sociological School from Bucharest.
The English website features downloadable CURS’ projects and articles. Some sections of the website can be accessed only after registration (free of charge).