THE MEANINGS OF THE COMMUNITY AND OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN SLOVAKIA AND IN SCOTLAND

The purpose of this paper was to examine meanings of the terms 'indivi dual', 'the community' and 'local community' in Slovakia and Scotland. The social, cultural, political and economic histories of these two s mall European nations are quite different. Slovakia is one of the post -communist countries in which rapid changes have recently taken place. In contrast, Scotland has enjoyed a relatively stable parliamentary d emocracy within the UK. Two groups of respondents, 200 from Slovakia a nd 200 from Scotland, were presented with a word association task whic h included 38 political and economic terms and with two scales contain ing the same list of terms. They rated phenomena referring to these te rms with respect to their importance for the well-being of the individ ual and to the well-being of the community. The results suggest that f or Scots but not for Slovaks, the term 'local community' evokes positi ve associations and that local community is a meaningful concept. The data suggest that local attachments and loyalties were destroyed in Sl ovakia during communism. ((C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)