Nikolai Tilkidjiev, born in Svilengrad, Bulgaria, in 1953. Ph.D. from Sofia University. Senior Research Associate and Head of the Department of Communities and Social Stratification, Institute of Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia.
My two-month stay at NIAS was exceptionally useful for my work. It took this rare opportunity for me to improve my knowledge in a specific but very important field of methodology of social sciences – system of indicators for measuring social inequalities and social stratification. I had the opportunity to meet and discuss various issues with famous Dutch scholars in the field. I got acquainted with
important publications, specific approaches, and codebooks of national and international comparative surveys. I not only finished a paper “Towards a System of Stratification Indicators” but also found some important methodological requirements to establish a unified system of indicators for measuring and archiving data for different social strata and their parametersin different social inequalities. As a whole NIAS is an excellent example of a scientific organisation which encourages individual and collective creative research. Reading current literature and the meetings with colleagues from the Netherlands and the TRIS group, gave me the confidence to judge what is significant and valuable in a wider context. Particularly the daily contact with colleagues from Central and Eastern Europe contributed to collective and sociable ways of producing scientific work as well as overcoming the loneliness of