Section 3 provides technical details concerning the selection of studies and harmonization procedures used. Section 2 of this article explains the purpose and research strategy adopted for the project.
The result was the CARPE project, to which readers will be introduced in this paper. Given these considerations, we proceeded to extend the Italian dataset into a comparative (European) dimension, with the intended scope to have the widest possible coverage of European countries for the past 40 years. Finally, it opens the opportunity for collaboration with researchers willing to replicate the same strategy in different contexts, or with an interest in the theoretical and methodological issues mentioned above.
They may deal with the issue of total survey error from a variety of methodological perspectives: wording, administration modes, sampling, or weighting. In the context of a harmonized dataset, researchers may increase the reliability of the estimates. It offers the opportunity to tackle multiple research questions: describing trends of religious change, examining subgroup variation, disentangling period and cohort effects, and providing aggregate information for research projects in which religiosity plays the role of contextual variable. Since the beginning of research on this subject, it has been clear how fruitful such an approach incorporating different survey programmes can be. 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 19. The first results of this work on the Italian case have been published in Vezzoni and Biolcati-Rinaldi ( 2015). Based on this contribution, we decided to go further in the harmonization process in order to include as many datasets as possible. The basic idea of harmonizing different studies (the EVS, WVS, ESS, etc.) came from a paper on church attendance trend in Italy (Pisati 2000). 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 origin of CARPE (Church Attendance and Religious change Pooled European dataset) Footnote 1 lies in a research project started few years ago and devoted to religious voting in Europe. Finally, some possible applications of the CARPE dataset will be introduced. 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. This results in a sample of approximately 1.8 million individual observations. 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. The main focus of this cumulative approach is the variable regarding church attendance, which has been harmonized in various ways. 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. This makes it possible to broaden the available observation window, both across countries and over time. 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). Despite the long-lasting interest in religious change, debates on the topic have been heated and are still far from being settled.
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