Factors and tools for shaping attitudes and behaviour towards law in public education – An interview with Zoltán Rónay about his winning ADVANCED research project

On 16 December 2024, the winners of the National Research Excellence Programme –  ADVANCED research project competition were announced. Zoltán Rónay, a professor at the Institute of Education, and his project is among the 96 winners. Work on the project started on 1 January 2025; we asked Zoltán Rónay about winning the grant, the project itself, and future tasks as well.

What was your first reaction and your first thought when you found out that your application was one of the winners of the National Research Excellence Programme – ADVANCED research project competition?

On the day the results were published, an old colleague of mine from the Faculty of Law wrote to me to congratulate me on winning the grant. I was very surprised because there was no way of tracking when the results would be published. I can’t even describe how I felt, it was just unbelievable.

What is the history of this project proposal?

With minor modifications, this was the fifth time I had submitted this application. From the second submission onwards, it received very good reviews and always just missed out on receiving the funding. On the fifth attempt, although feeling somewhat enervated and anticipating a fifth rejection, I submitted the application only because everyone who had read or worked on the application said it was worth submitting again.

The revision of the proposal was necessary not only because of the criticisms, but also because it had originally been written as an OTKA (Hungarian Scientific Research Fund) proposal, but this year we submitted it as an ADVANCED proposal, which required a different framework and focus. Accordingly, we streamlined and, from a research methodological point of view, adapted the proposal with my colleague and friend Katalin Felvinczi.

In what areas do you think your application stands out from the rest?

This application was supposed to fail from the get-go. There were 786 applications, of which 96 were successful, and of the 96 successful applications only 20 were not medical, technical or natural-scientific. Two entries from the field of educational science won, including this one.

I’m not familiar with the other applications, so I don't know who I was competing against. I think that perhaps what makes this research stand out is that it is looking for an answer to a problem that is current and under-researched even on an international level, besides being interdisciplinary in nature. With the reorganisation of the ADVANCED, it has perhaps become more important to feature more scientific fields in the proposals. It may also have been appreciated that there are educational, legal – in particular legal-sociological – and psychological elements in the proposal. The other point is that foreigners have been among the reviewers of this research, and foreigners had always liked this proposal because the problem we are trying to investigate during the project is not a specifically Hungarian problem, only that we are trying to explore it in Hungary.

What is included in the proposal? What are your objectives and what will be the “end result” – writing a book, launching a training programme, or even both?

The Research Group for Education-Law-Pedagogy was originally set up for this project, but this application will go far beyond the research group. It was deliberately submitted with the participation of colleagues from other research groups from the Institute of Education, from the Institute of Intercultural Psychology and Education, from the Faculty of Law and from Bárczi. As I see it now, the circle of contributors will expand even beyond that, and I certainly expect further connections from the Institute.

This is purely a basic research project. Articles and a volume of studies will be published and a conference will be organised at the end of the three-year project process. The starting point of this project had already evolved into a previous OTDK (National Conference of Scientific Students) and ÚNKP (New National Excellence Programme) research project, in which Kevin Kormos, my PhD student, and I scrutinised two schools to see what students and teachers there think about law. The results showed that neither teachers nor students have any idea about their own rights and the legal environment in which they operate as students and teachers, and they see law mostly from the perspective of sanctions, threats or consequences. We have published a summary of this project in the journal Iskolakultúra with the title of “Law: safety net or threat?”

The first part of the project process is a literature review. We will investigate whether there is any prior research on the topic. There has been research on legal awareness and rights consciousness in Hungary, but it is not school specific. We are planning a quantitative, large-sample questionnaire survey as well, for which we will commission interviewers (from a specialised company). In addition, we not only want to find out what school stakeholders know about the law, but also to investigate their relationship with the law using attitudinal research methodology. Based on this, we should have a clearer picture, which is backed up by scientific research, about the current situation of legal awareness in Hungary. Once we will have the results, we could even expand it into an international comparative study.

Is there a plan to channel all this knowledge into practice after the project has finished, perhaps through workshops or educational programmes?

Of course, this would be the long-term goal, but in the current circumstances, with the newly monopolised situation of teacher training, this does not seem to be a realistic objective. I have been teaching the optional course “The legal and ethical frameworks of the teaching profession” for a very long time, mostly for teacher trainees. Experience has shown that there are very few students who have any knowledge of law and, at the end of the course, the feedback from students is that this course should be made compulsory since students do not get any knowledge of law otherwise during their years here.

The interview was conducted by demonstrator Laura Lőkös.