Személynevek a kvantitatív társadalomtudományokban

The authors provide a non-exhaustive review of studies employing individual names (both surnames and given names) as their primary data source in quantitative social sciences, such as economics, economic history, sociology, social psychology and public health. Researchers in these fields mostly either examine the impact of specific name types on individual outcomes (i.e., earnings) or use names as proxy variables for some intrinsic individual quality (such as national or ethnic identity or social status). In the second part of the paper, the authors review their work, relying on historical Hungarian surname distribution to examine social mobility between 1949 and 2017 (Bukowski et al. 2021). Based on various data sources, the authors show that social mobility was limited in Hungary during the period under consideration. Family names associated with the elite in the 18th century still correlate with higher-than-average status in the 21st. The authors find no significant differences between social mobility rates under two very different social and political regimes (i.e., socialism and post-socialist democracy). They also found that the social status of the names associated with the Roma minority in Hungary decreased during the observed period.