Priority topics of research projects for entrance examination

Ing. Zuzana Kotherová, Ph.D.

Research topic Rethinking Health and Care Professions: Perceptions, Boundaries, and the Transformation of Roles and Responsibilities

Aim of the research Changing demographics, rising patient expectations, and increasing care complexity are reshaping health systems worldwide. In response, health professions are undergoing significant transformations: while traditional roles are under pressure to adapt - through shifts in responsibilities, tasks, and competencies - new or hybrid roles are emerging, such as care coordinators, intercultural workers, or community-based health. Across countries, these new roles vary widely in name, function, and institutional recognition, and many remain informal or precarious. Yet evidence suggests they play crucial roles, particularly during crises, by ensuring access, continuity, and responsiveness of care.

These evolving roles and responsibilities place additional pressure on already strained health systems, challenging established structures of coordination, legitimacy, and professional identity. This research will examine how such changes are perceived, accepted, or contested. It will focus on professional boundaries, role recognition, and the dynamics of task-sharing and task-shifting across occupational groups and levels of the system. The topic can be approached through qualitative or mixed methods and tailored to the student’s context.

Mgr. Martin Nekola, Ph.D.

Research topic Digital Communities, Moderation, and Harm Reduction: An Analysis of “Research Chemical” Users in Online Environments

Aim of the research New psychoactive substances (NPS), commonly referred to as research chemicals (RC), represent a key phenomenon in today’s drug landscape. They are distributed primarily via the internet—partly through clearnet e-shops and partly through community platforms such as Telegram or Discord. Current research focuses mainly on toxicological and forensic aspects. In contrast, the sociological dimension—how online communities around RC emerge, how they share and legitimise knowledge, what harm-reduction (HR) strategies are generated within these communities, and how they are shaped by moderation and platform governance—remains significantly understudied. Recent studies indicate that discussion forums such as Reddit or Bluelight may function as a bottom-up harm-reduction infrastructure: users exchange information on dosing, risky combinations, substance testing, and bodily reactions. Moderators on these forums play a hybrid role - expert, ethical, and organisational. Yet we still know little about how such knowledge stabilises, how it evolves under the pressures of moderation, and what its actual preventive impact is. The primary aim of this research is to understand how online communities focused on the use of research chemicals in Europe collectively create, validate, and disseminate harm-reduction knowledge, and what role moderators play as epistemic actors within these communities.

PhDr. Vilém Novotný, Ph.D.

Research topic Policy conflicts in the Policy Conflict Framework’s perspectives

Aim of the research Policy conflicts, with various intensity and positive or negative effects on public policies, are a natural part of the policy process. However, their direct conceptualization and operationalization is underdeveloped in the field of policy process research. But the Policy Conflict Framework (PCF - Weible & Heikkila 2017) provides theoretical, methodological, and empirical understanding of the characteristics, causes, drivers, intensity and effects of policy conflicts in different public policies based on interaction between cognitive and behavioral characteristics, policy setting (level of action, policy issue, characteristics of policy actors, events) and outputs as well outcomes.

prof. Ing. Michal Plaček, Ph.D.

Research topic Public procurement

Research topic AI – efficiency, productivity, ethics, and sustainability

prof. PhDr. Martin Potůček, CSc., M.Sc.

Research topic Interactions of the pension provision and long-term care in ensuring a dignified life for vulnerable citizens

Research topic Barriers of large-scale decision-making tasks in public administration

doc. Ing. et Ing. Eliška Vejchodská, Ph.D.

Research topic No net land take – governance and perceptions

Aim of the research Land and soil represent essential commons that remain far from being used sustainably in Europe, despite long-standing policy efforts to curb land take and soil sealing. Frezzi et al. (2025) highlight significant knowledge gaps related to policy design and societal acceptance, all of which influence the feasibility of achieving no net land take and no net soil sealing targets. The doctoral research may focus on one of the following areas of interest: identifying promising governance regimes for land protection, understanding how key actors perceive and respond to land take and soil sealing policy goals, and examining the factors that shape public and stakeholder acceptance.

FREZZI, Silvia et al. Outlook on the knowledge gaps to reduce soil sealing and increase the reuse of urban soil. Soils for Europe. 2025, 1(September 2025), 1-26. Available at: https://brgm.hal.science/hal-05272031/file/soils4europe_article_149412.pdf

Research topic Biodiversity offset policies – acceptability and perceptions

Aim of the research Biodiversity offsetting has become an increasingly used policy approach to strengthen biodiversity conservation by ensuring no net loss—or even a net gain—of biodiversity in the context of land development. Achieving these goals requires imposing clear and sometimes stringent obligations on developers and investors, which may reduce policy acceptability among actors who bear the direct costs of offsetting measures and may, in turn, shift part of this burden onto end consumers. Understanding how such policies are perceived is therefore critical for their effective design and implementation. This research focuses on public and/or stakeholder perceptions of biodiversity offsetting, examining the factors that shape societal acceptance, perceived fairness, and support for offsetting mechanisms, as well as the potential distributional consequences associated with their adoption.

Research topic Rural Housing – Social and Environmental Aspects

(To be opened subject to funding, with the funding decision due in February 2026).

Aim of the research The research examines rural housing challenges in Europe through a land-focused lens, emphasizing the social and environmental dimensions of rural housing development. Its goal is to produce insights that support more sustainable rural housing strategies. By combining quantitative analysis based on questionnaire surveys conducted in several rural municipalities with qualitative insights from local actors, the project seeks to explain why rural housing systems often struggle to adapt to demographic and socio-economic change and to identify pathways toward more sustainable and socially equitable housing development. The project offers opportunities for international collaboration within an established consortium of research partners.

prof. PhDr. Arnošt Veselý, Ph.D.

Research topic Acceptance of Public Policies: Mechanisms, Factors, and Temporal Dynamics

Aim of the research To empirically investigate which factors contribute to the acceptance or rejection of public policies, and how these processes evolve over time. The topic can be applied to diverse policy domains (education, health, environment, social policy) and approached through quantitative surveys, panel data, qualitative methods, or experimental designs (survey experiments, vignettes).

Potential research questions:

•             How does acceptance of policies evolve over time — do we observe habituation, resistance, or legitimization?

•             Are certain types of policies inherently more difficult to accept (e.g., regulatory, restrictive, redistributive)?

•             Which social psychological mechanisms influence public attitudes?

•             What role does personal experience play?

Research topic Attitudes Toward Public Policies: Public Officials vs. Citizens, and the Role of Personal Experience

Aim of the research To explore why the attitudes of public officials often diverge from those of citizens, whether officials hold systematically different policy preferences, and how personal experience (e.g., with schooling, illness, migration, social services) moderates these differences.

Potential research questions:

•             Do public officials and citizens hold consistent and predictable attitude differences across policy fields?

•             Does personal experience (e.g., being a parent, patient, or business owner) shape policy attitudes differently for officials than for citizens?

•             To what extent are attitudes driven by expertise, values, or professional identity?

Note to both research areas: It is expected that these will be empirical dissertations. If interested, it is possible to provide access to existing quantitative datasets on public attitudes and attitudes of public officials in the Czech Republic. In such cases, it is expected that the student would complement the analysis with additional qualitative data collection.