DEKK INSTITUTE
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DEKK INSTITUTE
Social stability research centre
WE WANT TO UNDERSTAND REALITY, THEN LOOK FOR WAYS HOW TO IMPROVE IT
DEKK's long-term vision is to understand the problem of decline and regeneration of social cohesion in Europe. However, any big journey starts with few small steps, so we will start from Slovakia.
What is social cohesion?
"Social cohesion" is a term coined by scientists to describe the social forces that cause human groups to hold together. The term can be simply translated as a measure of trust within a group.
The erosion of social cohesion goes hand in hand with the erosion of collective identity and the weakening of local authorities and state institutions, which together subsequently means the disintegration of society's ability to respond to crises (so-called social resilience). This reduces the proportion of the population that responds to the crisis with a rally of solidarity, and, conversely, grows the proportion that responds to the crisis with distrust, suspicion and tribalization.
On the contrary, the growth of cohesion means a reduction in the costs of cooperation of larger groups of the population, which is positively correlated with lower crime rate or a higher ability of society to accumulate resources - and thus get wealthier. At the same time, societies with higher cohesion are often happier, less frustrated and tend to exist longer.
What we do
DEKK Institute is an independent research organization that was established in early 2020 at the initiative of several young scientists, students and humanitarian workers. The motive was an interest to understand society. Most DEKK members share the personal experience from conflict environments, medical projects and refugee camps in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa, where they were taught the hard way two important lessons. That the well-functioning society requires the care and peaceful personal commitment of its members and that despite many justified complains about the state our society finds itself in, we are still very lucky to live in the middle of Europe. Coming to these realisations we want to do our part to keep it that way.
DEKK Institute is a representative of the World Value Survey in Slovakia, the largest scientific polling organization in the world. WVS data contributes to the decision-making of organizations such as the UN, OSCE, OECD or the World Bank.
We design our own opinion polls and analytical tools. Consultants from Bratislava, Brno, Boston, Oxford, London and former survey specialists from Google help us to keep them in a state of the art quality. Our local partner is the FOCUS polling agency, which is able to integrate our requirements for adjusting the methodology of the surveys, and the Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, our academic partner on the World Value Survey project.
We believe that by providing practical tools, we can make life easier for state analysts, scientists, journalists and the general public, who will be able to verify the claims they face in the ever-increasing flow of information from standard and alternative media in the easily accessible databases we are preparing.
We want to contribute to the improvement of the public discourse, and at the same time to draw attention to this issue.
Our goal is long-term. We realize that understanding and subsequent intervention in the area of social cohesion is a job for about two generations. But we like Slovakia, all the more so because we spent several years abroad - in a better, but also significantly worse environments. We therefore know where we could grow as a society, but also how deep we could fall.
Our services
Collection of unique
data
We use broad spectrum of high-quality methods and data from our partners, cooperating and connecting with others for the most detailed surveys.
Simple visualizations and intuitive analytical tools
We want to make data available through intuitive visual and analytical tools for basic data processing that even a complete layman can handle.
Everything in one
place
Comprehensive social scientific data, accessible to all, with an explicit focus on simplified work with large data.
Why DEKK?
Doritt Dekk (born Dorothea Karoline Fuhrmann in 1917) was a native of Czechoslovakia (Brno) and during World War II contributed to the effort to decipher the Enigma. The name DEKK Institute is inspired by the idea that Doritt Dekk was working on a serious problem of her time, which few people knew and considered important at the time.
Social cohesion is today the equivalent of what Enigma once was. It is a key problem of our time affecting the whole of society, but few people are aware of it and even fewer people work on finding solutions. Doritt Dekk was thus an ordinary person who helped to solve an extraordinary problem, but after the war she returned to normal life and made a living as a designer. Are you familiar with the poster “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases” from the influenza epidemic? Then you are familiar with her work.
We too are ordinary people who joined forces to help solve an unusual problem. Inspired by Dorrit Dekk, we do this in addition to our ordinary work and lives - but with an extensive effort to maximize professionalism and cooperate with leading specialists in science and research.
Contact
info (at) dekk.sk
DEKK Institute
Lermontovova 911/3,
811 05 Bratislava-Old Town
IČO: 53486234
Mail: info (at) dekk.sk