Church Attendance and Religious change Pooled European dataset (CARPE): a survey harmonization project for the comparati
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Church Attendance and Religious change Pooled European dataset (CARPE): a survey harmonization project for the comparative analysis of long‑term trends in individual religiosity Ferruccio Biolcati1 · Francesco Molteni1 · Markus Quandt2 · Cristiano Vezzoni1 Accepted: 25 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Despite the long-lasting interest in religious change, debates on the topic have been heated and are still far from being settled. In order to provide a reliable data source through which to study these dynamics, the CARPE project harmonizes well-known international surveys containing items concerning religiosity (the ESS, Eurobarometer, EVS, ISSP and WVS). This makes it possible to broaden the available observation window, both across countries and over time. Moreover, the opportunities this provides for comparing different survey programmes also enable researchers to analyse the consistency of the results, minimizing the impact of random fluctuations and providing useful information with respect to the degree of confidence which can be placed on the relevant estimates. The main focus of this cumulative approach is the variable regarding church attendance, which has been harmonized in various ways. All in all, the CARPE dataset contains figures of religious practice for 45 countries spanning the period of 1970–2016 and derived from 1665 national surveys. This results in a sample of approximately 1.8 million individual observations. The aim of this contribution is to present the dataset’s composition, the harmonization procedure adopted, the strategy used to combine the single datasets and the reliability tests which have been performed. Finally, some possible applications of the CARPE dataset will be introduced. Keywords Harmonization · Religious change · Church attendance · Repeated crosssectional surveys · Europe
* Ferruccio Biolcati [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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1 Introduction The origin of CARPE (Church Attendance and Religious change Pooled European dataset)1 lies in a research project started few years ago and devoted to religious voting in Europe. In that context, those of us involved in the project were asked to provide a reliable description of the change of individual religiosity in Italy over time. The basic idea of harmonizing different studies (the EVS, WVS, ESS, etc.) came from a paper on church attendance trend in Italy (Pisati 2000). Based on this contribution, we decided to go further in the harmonization process in order to include as many datasets as possible. The first results of this work on the Italian case have been published in Vezzoni and Biolcati-Rinaldi (2015). Analysing the harmonized data, the authors depict the peculiar trend of religious change in Italy, with church attendance decreasing at different paces (including a period of stability in the 1980s) during the period between 1968 and 2010. Since the beginning of research on this subject, it has been
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