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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Crossing the borders. Tourist trips abroad in the biographies of Polish travellers

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The purpose of the present article is a brief presentation of the results of sociological research, which attempts to answer the question of how to construct memories of the moments of crossing state borders by the Poles in the years 1956 - 2012. The main time caesura is 1989. That exact date is a political boundary of the conditions of life of the Poles (from real socialistic to capitalistic). The theoretical frame of insight into the world of tourist trips of the Poles is sociological phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, and the chosen methodological approach – the biographical prospect. The research was conducted using qualitative interview (episodic) on a sample of 40 people, were travelling out of the country both before and after 1989. The research results show that the experience of crossing state borders are socially shared - similar ways of defining the situation dominates. There are also the original experiences where in the foreground there come the individual observations of the respondents determined by their biographical situation.