In Memoriam - Hedvig Sallay

By Harke Bosma (with help from Laszlo Katona, Claudia Dalbert, and Saskia Kunnen)

       Last June, dr. Hedvig (Hedi) Sallay died of a serious illness. This illness became apparent in early 2006, and, as a consequence -but very much to her regret- she was not able to participate in the EARA conference in May 2006, in Antalya, where she and I had organized a symposium on identity and identity styles. Self-esteem, identity and relationships in adolescence have been a longstanding interest in her academic career at Kossuth University in Debrecen (Hungary) that started after she received her MA degree in social psychology in 1982, at the same university.
       In her work she has always had a strong inter-national orientation and gave presentations at several European conferences, for the first time at the second European Conference on Developmental Psychology in 1986, in Rome. In 1996 she was for the first time present at an EARA conference (in Liège) and since then she became a very active member of the Association. First as a national representative, and later on also as an elected EARA Council member. At the EARA conference in Porto (2004) she and Saskia Kunnen had decided to organize a European workshop on the Identity Styles Inventory (ISI) developed by Berzonsky in the USA. Hungarian as well as Dutch data with this measure indicated psychometric problems. This workshop, funded by the Dutch organization for scientific research, was held in November 2006 in Groningen. Since August that year, she was fully back to work but her illness returned, a few days before she would travel to the workshop. She could not participate in ‘her’ meeting anymore and her questioning of the cross-cultural reliability and validity of the ISI came to a premature end. As one of the memories of her work, her data could fortunately be included in a cross-cultural dataset that is being analyzed by the Louvain group of Goossens, Luyckx and Smits.
       Hedvig’s second line of research concerned the belief in a just world. In this domain she did a lot of work together with prof. Claudia Dalbert of the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. This work resulted in 2004 in a co-edited volume (Dalbert & Sallay, ‘The justice motive in adolescence and young adulthood’, London: Routledge). A special section of the European Psychologist (2007) on dealing with strain at the workplace from a just-world perspective has been dedicated to Hedvig Sallay, ‘as a constant supporter of just world research in Europe’. Her death interrupted the preparation of her chapter for this special issue.
       Hedvig sometimes shared the feeling that she, as a female researcher from a former communist, east European country had to engage in a multiple frontiers fight to gain acceptance in the European scientific world. As a colleague I not only became impressed by her scholarly work, but also by her fighting spirit. Moreover, she was a very nice and friendly person, always interested in sharing her ideas and findings and open to other perspectives. The personal belief in a just world “reflects the belief that events in one’s own life are just” (Dalbert, European Psychologist, 2007, 12(4)). In 2005 Hedvig finished her ‘Habilitations’ Thesis and made a decisive step in her scientific career.
       It’s a very sad irony that soon afterwards she became fatally ill. She left behind her husband Laszlo Katona, and her two sons Kristof (22) and Vencel (19).

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