Mălina Voicu (2019) Religious Supply, Existential Insecurity and Church Attendance in Post-communist Romania, Review of Religious Research, DOI 10.1007/s13644-019-00381-2

The paper of our colleague Mălina Voicu was released last month. It focuses on the revival of church attendance in Romania, providing theoretical arguments that support the idea that the positive trend in religious practices has roots in the growth in number of houses of worship. Romania has the highest rate of construction of houses of worship in Europe, which provides easier access to religious services and fosters the growth of religious communities. The paper is partially supported by RemOSM grant and the empirical results rely on a composition of international and national survey data that covers a time span of 27 years, from 1991 to 2018. The data collected in Romania in 2017 and 2018 as part of new waves of European Values Study (EVS) and World Values Survey (WVS) are used as well.  to read the paper online, please follow the link: https://rdcu.be/bK3p9

Este inutil să spunem prea multe despre Ronald Inglehart, unul dintre cei mai influenți cercetători din științele sociale. Cartea sa din 2018, Cultural Evolution, este o explicație pe înțelesul tuturor despre cum se schimbă societățile, oferind argumente pertinente pentru realități contemporane precum Brexit sau ascensiunea populismului. Ea constituie totodată o sursă esențială atât pentru publicul larg, cât și pentru cercetare academică. Echipa noastră o recomandă spre lectură tuturor studenților în științe sociale, precum și celor interesați în a înțelege de ce gândim astăzi cum gândim, de ce familia, societatea, politica, organizațiile, locul de muncă, relațiile de gen, religiozitatea, statele, și oamenii la modul general sunt așa cum sunt astăzi.

Autorul a avut amabilitatea de a ne pune textul la dispoziție pentru o ediție în limba română. Eforturi conjugate a mai multor colegi români au făcut ca să avem azi plăcerea de a anunța volumul, de o calitate grafică remarcabilă. Cronologic, cei ce au făcut totul posibil sunt Călin Moldovan-Teselios, Mălina Voicu, Vasile Sebastian Dâncu, Vasile George Dâncu, Claudiu Tufiș și Bogdan Voicu.

Cartea este disponibilă pe site-ul Editurii Școala Ardeleană, a cărei muncă de editare merită apreciere și recunoaștere. Colecția care o găzduiește este Biblioteca SINTEZA, coordonată de Vasile Sebastian Dâncu. Traducerea aparține Mălinei Voicu, a cărei carieră profesională internațională în științele sociale este binecunoscută. O prefață semnată de Mălina Voicu, Bogdan Voicu și Claudiu Tufiș deschide cartea, prezentând contextul în care Inglehart poate fi înțeles.

Echipa noastră consideră cartea un eveniment autentic pentru spațiul românesc și vă îndeamnă la lectură!

Data details:

• The WVS sample is partly panel with the 2012 survey
• Both samples are randomly drawn from the Romanian non-institutionalized population (i.e. are representative at national level). Almost identical methodologies were employed in both cases. They are fully documented in the files attached to this release.
• The questionnaires overlap in roughly 75% of the variables. We have also produced and posted here a pooled dataset, with the corresponding weighting system.
• This release also includes the country specific items. A good part of them document the migration experience of the respondent and of his/her friends and relatives, being a unique source of information in this respect.

 

Further releases:

• Both EVS and WVS data will be integrated in European/World corresponding data files. The two groups constantly release updates of the international datasets, and deposit data with GESIS, and with JSP/ASEP correspondingly.
• Several other surveys bring additional data which is comparable to our data:

o   We are currently collecting a shorter version of questionnaire, from a sample of Romanian migrants (websurvey).

o   A sample of about 650 high school students in Timiș and surrounding counties filled in other reduced versions of the questionnaires in May 2018, in a study conduced by our colleagues from the Sociology Department in West University of Timișoara.

o   Colleagues from BrandBerry Research collected data from a sample of 1000 respondents in the 10 major Romanian city (websurvey) related to gender beliefs and family values.

 

Datafiles in this release:

• the EVS Romanian 2018 data file. SPSS and Stata versions are provided
• the WVS Romanian 2018 data file, both in SPSS and Stata formats.
• the pooled EVS/WVS 2018 Romania data set. The names of variables are documented in a very concise codebook.
• the longitudinal WVS 2012/2018 datafile. The panel variable is called idlocatie.
• full methodological details for both datasets, as they were submitted to central teams of EVS and WVS.

 

 

Files: datasets

format	SPSS	SPSS	Stata	Stata
labels	Romanian	English	Romanian	English
EVS 2018RO	evs2018RO.RO.zsav	evs2018RO.EN.zsav	evs2018RO.RO.dta	evs2018RO.EN.dta
WVS 2018RO	WVS2018RO.zsav	not available	WVS2018RO.dta	not available
VS 2018RO (pooled dataset)	VS.RO.2018	not available	VS.RO.2018	not available
WVS 2012/2018 (partly panel)	wvs2012-2018,Ro	not available	wvs2012-2018,Ro	not available

 A note on formats: SPSS and Stata are the main generalist software used in social sciences. Therefore our choice for property formats. In this way we also preserve variable and value labels. We have used .zsav instead of .sav for its much better compression. The Stata files use the Stata 13 (and higher) format. For reading into R, we suggest using the readstata13 package.

Files: metadata

	Methodological report	Questionnaire in Romanian	Master EN questionnaire*	Correspondence of variables
EVS 2018 RO	file	RO	EN	-
WVS 2018 RO	file	RO	EN	-
VS 2018 RO (pooled dataset)	-	-	-	EVS-WVS
WVS 2012/2018 (partly panel)	-	2012 RO	2012 EN	WVS 2012 2018

*Core versions that do not include the country specific items.

We welcome your feedback, comments, and inquiries at: bogdan@iccv.ro.

Please keep in mind that this data is not destined for commercial/for profit purposes, but for academic research. Also, we can answer questions related to data, but we have no time and resources to assist with data-analyses and related activities.

În perioada mai-iunie, echipa noastră colectează date despre valorile românilor emigranți printr-un sondaj online. Vrem să comparăm ce spun românii din afara țării cu ceea ce spun cei care locuiesc în țară. Am mai făcut acest lucru și în 2009, o facem și acum.

Pentru aceasta, vă rugăm să distribuiți linkul de mai jos către românii aflați în diaspora:

Menționăm faptul că a completa chestionarul ia aproximativ 15 minute, iar răspunsurile rămân anonime.

Last week, several members of our team presented their results in the Conference of the Department of Sociology from Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu (14th-15th of December, 2018). Two of the presentations are directly related to our groups interests:

Horatiu Rusu & Andrei Gheorghita - Social security spending and social solidarity in Romania.

The paper discusses the connection between support for solidarity (at individual level) and social expenses (at locality level).

Alexandra Deliu - Identity, dynamics and adjustments. The case of EU expats in Bucharest

The paper investigates how identity of EU expats to Bucharest is shaped by interaction with Romanian society.

On the conference:

When it comes to populism, one may have a lot of explanations, and most of them are rooted in the Western experience. What about how the populist landscape looks like in an Eastern European society, where populism seems embedded in the core of mainstream parties? Sorina Soare and our colleague Claudiu Tufiș bring to the readers an history of populism as displayed by political parties in the post-communist Romania. Their paper (party supported by our RemOSM grant) sheds light in a field almost unexplored, goes beyond the main parties, looks at newly established political competitors, and grasps in this way the dynamics of populist legitimacy in Romania. We strongly advise those interested to read the full paper, from which we have extracted the below table...

Are Romanians believing that Hell exists?

Data from WVS 2017-2018 allow us to answer the question.

We use the opportunity to launch our YouTube channel, with a rather experimental clip in which Bogdan Voicu explains how did belief in Hell changed over time, in Romania, and sketches a couple of explanations.

The very short clip is in Romanian, but English subtitles are provided as well.

While we still work on data cleaning the 2017-2018 versions of Romanian EVS and WVS datasets, it is time to introduce our new team members.

Romulus (PhD in Sociology, SNSPA, 2014) joined our group in spring 2018. He and his company (BrandBerry) provide studies in social and market research, as well as consultancy to various organizations. Active in the local community of Brașov, Romulus was included by Bussiness Magazine in its 2018 ranking of 100 Young Top Managers.

In spring 2018, Romulus carried out an online survey with respondents from the ten larger cities in Romania. The survey includes gender beliefs items identical to the ones in the current waves of EVS and WVS. Methodological experiments are likely to be carried out using data from the three sources.

One may see Romulus in action in its short interview for Business Magazine.

These days, our colleague Claudiu Tufiș is attending the "International Academic Conference of Values and Value Education under a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind" (June 19-21, 2018 – Changchun, China).

His presentation discusses the child-rearing values and makes use of the preliminary data from the 2017-2018 Romanian data from World Values Survey.

The basic message is the relative stability recorded in the past 5 years, with traditional values still being slightly more important as compared to imagination and independence.

Photos from the event in Changchun could be retrieved at this link.