Bence SágváriACADEMIC PERSONAL VCARD
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ABOUT

PERSONAL DETAILS
1098 Budapest, Tóth Kálmán u. 4.
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sagvari.bence@tk.hu
Hello and welcome to my Personal and Academic profile

BIO

ABOUT ME

I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences and act as head of CSS-Recens Computational Social Scienc Research Department. From 2021 I am also an associate professor at Corvinus University of Budapest where I am teaching social network analysis, research methodology and sociological theories. I received my Ph.D in sociology at ELTE University in 2011. From 2011, I work as the Hungarian national coordinator for the European Social Survey (ESS), one of the largest cross-national comparative social surveys in the world. In 2014/15, I was Visiting Fulbright Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington (USA). I have been represented as the Hungarian partner in several cross-national comparative survey projects, such as EU Kids Online (EUKO) or World Internet Project (WIP). Previously I was also member of the Pool of European Youth Researchers (PEYR) working for the EU/CoE Youth Partnership. I am co-owner of Business Software Solutions Ltd. (BSS), an IT company that developes various business software and smartphone application.

CONTACT

EMAIL

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RESUME

EDUCATION
  • 208
    2010
    BUDAPEST

    SOCIOLOGY - PHD

    ELTE UNIVERSITY

  • 2001
    1996
    BUDAPEST

    SOCIOLOGY - MA

    ELTE UNIVERSITY

CURRENT ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL POSITIONS
  • 2009
    present
    BUDAPEST

    SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW

    CENTRE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES

    www.tk.hu
  • 2021
    present
    BUDAPEST

    ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

    CORVINUS UNIVERSITY

    www.uni-corvinus.hu
  • 2019
    present
    BUDAPEST

    NEW BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR, CO-OWNER

    BUSINESS SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS Ltd.

    www.bssolutions.hu
HONORS AND AWARDS
  • 2007

    JUNIOR PRIMA AWARD

    Prima Primissima Foundation

    In the category of science
  • 2021

    POLÁNYI PRIZE

    For the best paper in sociology
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PUBLICATIONS

PUBLICATIONS LIST
04 Nov 2022

The double-edged sword of trust in the pandemic

In: Takáts, Előd; Nagy-Mohácsi, Piroska (szerk.) Emerging Europe's chronic distrust : Lessons from the region's COVID puzzle Budapest, Magyarország : Corvinus University of Budapest (2022) 148 p. pp. 91-110. , 20 p.


Book chapter BENCE SÁGVÁRI

The double-edged sword of trust in the pandemic

BENCE SÁGVÁRI
Book chapter
29 Dec 2021

COVID-19 and Society: Challenges of the New Normal. Editorial

Intersections EJSP 7(3)

DOI: 10.17356/ieejsp.v7i3.963

EditorialJournal article SÁGVÁRI B, KARSAI M, KOLTAI J

COVID-19 and Society: Challenges of the New Normal. Editorial

SÁGVÁRI B, KARSAI M, KOLTAI J
EditorialJournal article
09 Apr 2019

Still divided but more open. Mapping European attitudes towards migration before and after the migration crisis.

Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Budapest

LINK

Research report MESSING, V., SÁGVÁRI, B.

Still divided but more open. Mapping European attitudes towards migration before and after the migration crisis.

MESSING, V., SÁGVÁRI, B.
Research report
About The Publication
The report published by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung shows how attitudes across Europe have changed before and after the 2015 migration ‘crisis’ and tries toexplain what has driven those changes. Using data from the European Social Survey, the report’s authors find that, overall, perceptions of migration have remained both neutral and stable before and after the ‘crisis’. But there are a few countries that have become significantly more positive about migrants, as well as a few that have become significantly more negative.
09 Dec 2011

Creative occupations and regional development in Hungary: mobility of talent in a one-centered transition economy.

European Planning Studies (19) 2011/12, pp. 2073-2093

DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2011.633825

Journal article LENGYEL, B., B. SÁGVÁRI

Creative occupations and regional development in Hungary: mobility of talent in a one-centered transition economy.

LENGYEL, B., B. SÁGVÁRI
Journal article
About The Publication
This paper gives an example of how human capital contributes to regional development in a small transition economy. We add new categories of creative occupation in order to have better possibilities for regional education level-creative class comparisons. Efforts are also taken to handle mobility of talent by the type of knowledge being exploited in the occupations. The data are collected from 168 Hungarian sub-regions from 2001 and from 20 counties from years 1996 and 2005. Our findings suggest that contrary to the results in more developed countries, indicators of Hungarian creative occupations do not outperform education level measures of local labour force in describing regional development. Creative core is proved to have stronger effect on regional development than creative top and creative professionals. Moreover, university graduates with internationally mobile knowledge seem to be less attracted to the capital city than graduates, whose knowledge is more embedded into the national context. These latter occupations concentrate with a growing intensity in the capital, since it has been strengthened as the gate for the global market during the transition from planned to market economy.
11 Sep 2015

Geographies of an online social network: weak distance decay effect and strong spatial modularity.

PLoS ONE 10(9): e0137248

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0137248

Journal article LENGYEL, B., VARGA, A., SÁGVÁRI, B., JAKOBI, Á., KERTÉSZ, J.

Geographies of an online social network: weak distance decay effect and strong spatial modularity.

LENGYEL, B., VARGA, A., SÁGVÁRI, B., JAKOBI, Á., KERTÉSZ, J.
Journal article
About The Publication
How is online social media activity structured in the geographical space? Recent studies have shown that in spite of earlier visions about the “death of distance”, physical proximity is still a major factor in social tie formation and maintenance in virtual social networks. Yet, it is unclear, what are the characteristics of the distance dependence in online social networks. In order to explore this issue the complete network of the former major Hungarian online social network is analyzed. We find that the distance dependence is weaker for the online social network ties than what was found earlier for phone communication networks. For a further analysis we introduced a coarser granularity: We identified the settlements with the nodes of a network and assigned two kinds of weights to the links between them. When the weights are proportional to the number of contacts we observed weakly formed, but spatially based modules resemble to the borders of macro-regions, the highest level of regional administration in the country. If the weights are defined relative to an uncorrelated null model, the next level of administrative regions, counties are reflected.
29 Mar 2017

The Computational Turn in Social Sciences. Challenges of the New Empiricism in the Age of Big Data.

INTERSECTIONS EJSP 3(1) pp. 5-14.

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0137248

EditorialJournal article SÁGVÁRI, B.

The Computational Turn in Social Sciences. Challenges of the New Empiricism in the Age of Big Data.

SÁGVÁRI, B.
EditorialJournal article
About The Publication
Today large amounts of data are available to use for research on human behaviour: social media, data from online social networks, vast amounts of digital text, sensory information from personal hand-held and other devices, information from search engine usage and other online services, etc. The industry that relies on collecting, combining, selling and analysing digital footprints for all kinds of purposes ranging from simple targeted advertising to risk assessments and mass surveillance is developing with lightning speed. (Van Es and Schäfer, 2017). However, such data could increasingly be used to address larger societal issues of social interactions and relations, inequality, education, healthcare, political participation, and more. The advances in the use of such data in social sciences offer the possibility to answer questions that were beyond research in the past, and this new generation of large-scale, complex, and usually unstructured data requires new forms of data analysis and scientific applications. Some also suggest that as a consequence of the data revolution that we are already living in, a major paradigm shift in science is expected with far-reaching consequences to how research is conducted and knowledge is produced (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2013; Meyer and Schroeder, 2015). While the course of development in the data-driven industries and research seems to be unambiguous for the future in terms of its expected impact on business and how societies function in general, today the possibilities are still frequently overestimated by some ‘positivistic prophets’ – coming mostly from outside academia. In addition to presenting the main arguments of the papers in this section, the purpose of this editorial is to highlight a few of those issues and challenges that may shape the future of social sciences and of those who pursue in it, in relation to the new data landscape. After briefly elaborating on the definitions of Big Data, the focus will move to the question of epistemology; the changing dynamics among various fields of sciences; the new divides in access to data; and the main ideas behind the critical approach that social sciences might follow to find their right place in the puzzle.
14 Feb 2018

Where metaphors really come from: Social factors as contextual influence in Hungarian teenagers’ metaphorical conceptualizations of life.

Cognitive Linguistics, 29(1), pp. 121-154.

DOI: 10.1515/cog-2016-0139

Journal article BENCZES, R., SÁGVÁRI, B.

Where metaphors really come from: Social factors as contextual influence in Hungarian teenagers’ metaphorical conceptualizations of life.

BENCZES, R., SÁGVÁRI, B.
Journal article
About The Publication
When it comes to metaphorical conceptualizations of life, previous cognitive linguistic research has identified cultural history as the single most important factor in the selection of the source domain. Accordingly, Hungary had to constantly battle for survival, prompting Hungarians to think of life primarily in terms of struggle and compromise, resulting in a more negative mindset towards life. We investigated the validity of this claim by drawing on a nationwide survey of Hungarian teenagers. Three main findings of the research are presented in the paper. First, the identified metaphors were of a general character and no particularly prevalent, negative conceptualizations emerged; Hungarian teenagers conceptualize life primarily as game, food, journey, challenge, plant and rollercoaster. Second, social factors – type and location of school, socio-economic status and media consumption – can have an effect on the selection of source domains, thus lessening the importance of cultural history in shaping metaphorical conceptualizations of life. Third, social factors influence speakers’ overall inclination toward metaphorical usage. Our results suggest that inclination to verbalize metaphorical conceptualizations is not all-pervasive throughout the whole linguistic community, but is constrained by type of school (at the secondary level), mother’s level of education, academic performance and reading habits.
01 Dec 2018

Life is a battlefield: Conceptualizations of life among Hungarian adults.

. Society & Economy 40(4), pp. 571–586

DOI: 10.1556/204.2018.40.4.6

Journal article BENCZES, R., SÁGVÁRI,B.

Life is a battlefield: Conceptualizations of life among Hungarian adults.

BENCZES, R., SÁGVÁRI,B.
Journal article
About The Publication
This study attempts to investigate how Hungarians think about life. By applying a nationwide representative survey of Hungarian adults, we wished to answer the following two research questions: a) what are the major metaphorical conceptualizations of life among Hungarians?; and b) what factors, such as socio-economic status and basic value orientations, might influence the prevalence for the metaphors used to talk about life? Our results suggest that there are considerable generational differences: while the negative mindset (in the form of more negative metaphors) is still common within the older generation, there is a shift towards a more positive and more “American” conceptualization of life among younger people in Hungary.
18 Feb 2021

Inequality is rising where social network segregation interacts with urban topology.

Nature Communications 12, 1143

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21465-0

Journal article Selected TÓTH G., J. WACHS, R. DI CLEMENTE, Á. JAKOBI, B. SÁGVÁRI, J. KERTÉSZ & B. LENGYEL

Inequality is rising where social network segregation interacts with urban topology.

TÓTH G., J. WACHS, R. DI CLEMENTE, Á. JAKOBI, B. SÁGVÁRI, J. KERTÉSZ & B. LENGYEL
Journal article Selected
About The Publication
Social networks amplify inequalities by fundamental mechanisms of social tie formation such as homophily and triadic closure. These forces sharpen social segregation, which is reflected in fragmented social network structure. Geographical impediments such as distance and physical or administrative boundaries also reinforce social segregation. Yet, less is known about the joint relationships between social network structure, urban geography, and inequality. In this paper we analyze an online social network and find that the fragmentation of social networks is significantly higher in towns in which residential neighborhoods are divided by physical barriers such as rivers and railroads. Towns in which neighborhoods are relatively distant from the center of town and amenities are spatially concentrated are also more socially segregated. Using a two-stage model, we show that these urban geography features have significant relationships with income inequality via social network fragmentation. In other words, the geographic features of a place can compound economic inequalities via social networks.
30 Jun 2021

Urban Geographical Patterns of the Relationship Between Mobile Communication, Social Networks and Economic Development – The Case of Hungary.

Hungarian Geographical Bulletin, 70(2), 129-148.

DOI: 10.15201/hungeobull.70.2.3

Journal article EGEDY T., SÁGVÁRI B.

Urban Geographical Patterns of the Relationship Between Mobile Communication, Social Networks and Economic Development – The Case of Hungary.

EGEDY T., SÁGVÁRI B.
Journal article
About The Publication
In the post-industrial age, the transformation of urban networks and urban regions was fundamentally influenced by the rapid spread of infocommunication technologies (ICT) and the Internet. People share information in their daily lives with the help of various ICT devices and ultimately generate georeferenced data that could obtain important information about people’s use of space, spatial movement and social connections. The main aim of the study is to explore the urban geographical and spatial impacts of ICT and social media networks in Hungarian cities. We focus on drawing territorial and settlement hierarchical patterns and clusters based on the mobile communication and online social network relationship data of Hungarian cities. The paper highlights the relationship between the intensity of mobile communication and the density and expansion of intercity social relations and the settlements’ level of economic development, respectively. The methodology is based on mobile phone call detail record (CDR) analysis and intercity network analysis of social media activities. Our findings suggest that different communication networks follow divergent spatial patterns in Hungary. The traditional East–West dichotomy of the Hungarian spatial divide is still reflected in mobile communication, but intercity clusters based on social media activities are usually aligned to the borders of administrative structures. In several cases, we were able to identify strong intercity links between settlements with a similar level of economic development of the mesolevel spatial structure that traverses over different counties and regional borders. Results on social and demographic issues suggest that ‘generation Z’ could play a key role in dampening the social and economic tensions created by the digital divide in the long run. Using a multidimensional explanatory model, we could demonstrate the growing interconnectedness between digital networks and economic development.
16 Jul 2021

Migrants are not welcome. Metaphorical framing of fled people in Hungarian online media, 2015–2018.

Journal of Language and Politics

DOI: 10.1075/jlp.20042.ben

Journal article BENCZES, R., SÁGVÁRI, B.

Migrants are not welcome. Metaphorical framing of fled people in Hungarian online media, 2015–2018.

BENCZES, R., SÁGVÁRI, B.
Journal article
About The Publication
Figurative framing, in the form of metaphorical expressions, is especially effective in carrying conceptual content on an issue and affecting public opinion. One topic that has been heavily debated in contemporary Hungarian media is migration. Framing starts with the label that journalists select to refer to fled people:  (“immigrant”),  (“migrant”) or  (“refugee”). Depending on the label, different associations emerge, resting upon differing (metaphorical) conceptualizations evoked by the labels. We analysed metaphorical compounds based on the keywords in a media corpus of approx. 15 million words. Our results indicate that while all three keywords evoke predominantly negative frames and evaluations that build on stock metaphorical conceptualizations of fled people as also identified in the international literature – such as  and  –, the distribution of these metaphors does vary, depending on a) the selected keyword; and b) the political agenda of the media source.
01 Jan 2021

Are Anti-Immigrant Attitudes the Holy Grail of Populists? A Comparative Analysis of Attitudes Towards Immigrants, Values, and Political Populism in Europe.

Intersections EJSP 7(2)

DOI: 0.17356/ieejsp.v7i2.750

Journal article MESSING, V., SÁGVÁRI, B.

Are Anti-Immigrant Attitudes the Holy Grail of Populists? A Comparative Analysis of Attitudes Towards Immigrants, Values, and Political Populism in Europe.

MESSING, V., SÁGVÁRI, B.
Journal article
About The Publication
In this paper we aim to discuss attitudes towards immigrants in a European context and analyse drivers of anti-immigrant attitudes such as the feeling of control, basic human values, political orientation and preferences related to right-wing populism. Based on data from the European Social Survey, we first describe how attitudes of people in Europe changed throughout a period of almost two decades (between 2002 and 2018). We will show that although attitudes are influenced by a number of demographic and subjective features of individuals, on the macro-level they seem to be surprisingly stable, yet hide significant cross-country differences. Then, we zoom in to the three most significant elements influencing attitudes towards immigrants: the feeling of control, basic human values, and political orientation. Applying a multi-level model we test the validity of three theories about factors informing attitudes towards immigrants—competition theory, locus of control, and the role of basic human values—and include time (pre- and post-2015 refugee-crisis periods) into the analysis. In the discussion we link ESS data to recent research on populism in Europe that categorizes populist parties across the continent, and establish that the degree to which anti-migrant feelings are linked to support for political populism varies significantly across European countries. We show that right-wing populist parties gather and feed that part of the population which is very negative towards migrants and migration in general, and this process is also driven by the significance awarded the value of security vis-à-vis humanitarianism.
01 Jul 2021

Attitudes Towards Participation in a Passive Data Collection Experiment

Sensors. 2021; 21(18):6085

DOI: 10.3390/s21186085

Journal article SÁGVÁRI B, GULYÁS A, KOLTAI J.

Attitudes Towards Participation in a Passive Data Collection Experiment

SÁGVÁRI B, GULYÁS A, KOLTAI J.
Journal article
About The Publication
In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory study conducted in Hungary using a factorial design-based online survey to explore the willingness to participate in a future research project based on active and passive data collection via smartphones. Recently, the improvement of smart devices has enabled the collection of behavioural data on a previously unimaginable scale. However, the willingness to share this data is a key issue for the social sciences and often proves to be the biggest obstacle to conducting research. In this paper we use vignettes to test different (hypothetical) study settings that involve sensor data collection but differ in the organizer of the research, the purpose of the study and the type of collected data, the duration of data sharing, the number of incentives and the ability to suspend and review the collection of data. Besides the demographic profile of respondents, we also include behavioural and attitudinal variables to the models. Our results show that the content and context of the data collection significantly changes people’s willingness to participate, however their basic demographic characteristics (apart from age) and general level of trust seem to have no significant effect. This study is a first step in a larger project that involves the development of a complex smartphone-based research tool for hybrid (active and passive) data collection. The results presented in this paper help improve our experimental design to encourage participation by minimizing data sharing concerns and maximizing user participation and motivation.
01 Jan 2017

Methodological Challenges in Cross-comparative Surveys: The Case of Understanding Attitudes towards Democracy in Hungary

Intersections EJJSP

LINK

Journal article Messing, V., Ságvári, B.; Simon D.

Methodological Challenges in Cross-comparative Surveys: The Case of Understanding Attitudes towards Democracy in Hungary

Messing, V., Ságvári, B.; Simon D.
Journal article
About The Publication
Our paper examines the validity of the rotating questionnaire block about perceptions about and attitudes towards democracy included inthe sixth round of the European Social Survey (ESS). The preliminary assumptions that inspired our analysis were that respondents’ understanding of the questions formulated in such an internationally comparative survey may be challenged due to diverging theoretical constructions and narratives that feed historically developed notions of ‘democracy.’ Moreover, even within the same country people with a different socioeconomic, ethnic, and educational background may have different perceptions about the same questionnaire ‘items.’ We applied a multi-method approach to analyze the above methodological puzzle: a complex statistical analysis of the Hungarian ESS data served to help examine the consistency of answers to individual items and the entirety of the questionnaire block, while supplementary focus group research helped us apprehend the variety of interpretations of and perceptions about the individual items, as well as problems with understanding various terms included in the questions that assessed attitudes towards democracy. Our findings support the initial hypothesis: respondents had obvious difficulties understanding some of the items designed to assess attitudes towards democracy, while many others had differing interpretations. We conclude that even though the ESS is one of the most refined, wellprepared and validated comparative surveys in Europe, the related data cannot be analyzed without careful consideration of what the individual questions might mean in different contexts.
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RESEARCH & WORKS

MY PORTFOLIO
CSS/TKCurrent projects

MI SURVEY

MI SURVEY

About The Project
A digitalizációval és mesterséges intelligenciával kapcsolatos társadalmi ismeretek és attitűdök Magyarországon
BSSClosed projects

Millió lépés az életért

Millió lépés az életért

CSS/TKCurrent projects

Fent vagyok az iwiw-en!

Fent vagyok az iwiw-en!

CSS/TKCurrent projects

European Social Survey

European Social Survey

About The Project
Egyszer volt, hol nem volt.
CSS/TKCurrent projects

CODE EUROPE

CODE EUROPE

Current projects

OCTOPUS RESREARCH

OCTOPUS RESREARCH

About The Project
Az Octopus Research Tools egy olyan eszköz, amely a tudományos kutatások számára kínál a hagyományos survey- és szenzor-alapú adatgyűjtési technikákat egyesítő innovatív megoldásokat.
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TEACHING

CURRENT
  • NOW
    2021
    BUDAPEST

    ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

    CORVINUS UNIVERSITY OF BUDAPEST

    Courses taught: Social Network Analysis (SNA), Foundations of Social Sciences
TEACHING HISTORY
  • 2015
    2014
    BLOOMINGTON, IN, USA

    VISITING FULBRIGHT PROFESSOR

    INDIANA UNIVERSITY BLOOMINGTON

    Courses taught: Organizational Sociology, Global Youth Studies, Digital Sociology, European Social Survey (ESS)
  • 2020
    2012
    BUDAPEST

    TEACHING AND RESEARCH FACULTY

    INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS SCHOOL