“Paltry Pensions” in the Context of the Sense of Social Justice and the Goals of Pension Policy

In 1999, a new public pension system was introduced in Poland. One of the fundamental changes was the transition from a defined benefit to a defined contribution system. After the reform, the amount of retirement benefits for individuals became closely linked to the total sum of contributions recorded in their personal accounts maintained by the Social Security Institution (Zakład Ubezpieczeń Społecznych – ZUS). An adequately long insurance period was no longer a requirement for receiving a pension; however, it was a condition for the state to increase the pension to the minimum pension amount. When the new system came into effect, people who could not document the required insurance period began to receive pensions lower than the minimum pension.This dataset contains qualitative materials from a project titled “’Paltry Pensions’ in the Context of the Sense of Social Justice and the Goals of Pension Policy: A Multidimensional Sociological Analysis,” funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (grant number 2021/41/B/HS6/04416) and conducted from 2022 to 2026. The project was designed to answer the following research questions:Which categories of life situations can we identify in the histories of people receiving pensions lower than the minimum pension, considering (a) their life pathways (related to occupational careers, family, health, etc.), (b) the strategies they employed in the past (i.e. before reaching retirement age) to provide means of subsistence, (c) any strategies they used in the past aimed at ensuring financial security for the following years, and (d) the living conditions and means of subsistence of such individuals?Are the legal regulations that result in the provision of pensions lower than the minimum considered (by the pensioners receiving such benefits, by experts, and by the general public) to be socially just and effective concerning the objectives of pension policy? If not, what changes should be introduced to make these regulations more equitable and effective?Tasks planned for the project included:Analysing available data from the Social Security Institution and nationwide panel surveys (primarily POLPAN and data for Poland from the SHARE survey),Conducting qualitative interviews (IDIs) with (a) people receiving pensions below the minimum or expecting to receive such benefits within the next five years, and (b) experts,Conducting discourse analysis based on selected documents from the Polish Parliamentary Corpus and media information from four online news portals,Conducting a survey on a nationwide sample regarding knowledge of the pension system and its evaluation in the context of a sense of social justice.This dataset contains:38 anonymised transcripts of the IDIs with people receiving pensions below the minimum or expecting to receive such benefits within the next five years. The IDIs were conducted in 2022–2023.13 transcripts of the IDIs with experts (in two separate files, as interviewees had the option to choose between two licenses). The IDIs were conducted in 2022–2024.A list of publicly available materials that formed the basis of the analysis of parliamentary and media discourse, with links to these materials.Supplementary documents.