Questions concerning religious conceptions and church customs

When this study began in the 1940s the researchers set out with the view that a formerly more or less universal Swedish unitary ecclesiastic culture was in the process of dissolving. The socio-economic changes of the early 19th century were believed to have led to religious conceptions differentiating and customs not being taken for granted any more. The scientists held that only small parts remained of an earlier natural and unitary ecclesiastic culture.
Based on this view the researchers conducted an extensive project to gather information about those remains of this earlier church life that were still to be found, in the same way that general ethnography conducted research on customs in other areas of life. The researchers were of the opinion that earlier research had ignored the spiritual side of folk life and that this was problematic since it missed an important part of the daily life and ways of thinking of the population that were deeply rooted in Christianity.

Purpose:

To document those ecclesiastic customs and practices which at the time when the study was conducted were considered to be the dwindling left-overs of a former "ecclesiastic unitary culture".

About 5.600 text files containing free-text answers to the questions of the study from respondents from all parts of Sweden. The files are sorted according to diocese and parish. Also included is an accessions register in spreadsheet format. NOTE! The text files are encoded as UTF-8. If the Swedish characters å, ä and ö are not displayed properly you need to change the program's settings to UTF-8.