Mapping and Characterizing Nordic Everyday Life Research
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Mapping and Characterizing Nordic Everyday Life Research Kristina Karlsson Anna Olaison Karin Skill Arbetsnotat Nr 343, maj 2010 ISSN 1101-1289 ISRN LiU-TEMA-T-WP-343-SE Acknowledgements The authors of this report, Kristina Karlsson, Anna Olaisson, and Karin Skill, developed it at the request of the local network on Everyday Life Research at Linköping University, of which we are members. We thank the local network for entrusting us with this task and supporting us all the way. We also thank the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Linköping University for making the work possible by partially financing it. However, the making of this report required more than monetary support. The efforts of librarian Christina Brage, who searched through thousands of references, have been vital. The patient librarian Jenny Betmark made the handling of the references easier by teaching us how to use RefWorks. Our colleague Helena Karresand assisted us with the translation of the Finnish references. Our everyday life research colleagues in the Nordic research network on Everyday Life Processes in European Societies (ELPiES) have offered valuable feedback and encouragement. Finally, Peter Berkesand and David Lawrence at Linköping University Electronic Press made our dreams of an Everyday Life Research Database seem attainable. Thanks to you all! Linköping, May 2010 Kristina Karlsson Anna Olaison Karin Skill 2 Summary The aim of this report is to present references that originate from the Nordic countries, including Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway, and that have been assigned the keyword “everyday life” or one of its Nordic counterparts and published in the period 1990 through 2008. The presentation includes information on the total number of references from each country, the most frequent authors and the institutions to which they belong, and the reference types and the number of each type. Based on an analysis of some limited information about the dissertations and the journals, it is discussed how Nordic everyday life research may be characterized. In total 560 references were found in the search procedure that is described in the report. The number of references from the different countries is: Finland 176, Sweden 171, Denmark 110, and Norway 103. The analysis imply that the field of Nordic everyday life research is big, multifaceted, and multi- and interdisciplinary. It is performed mainly within the frame of various social science subjects, but also to quite a great extent within subjects of health science, and to a minor extent within technology subjects. Some of the references seem to represent studies with a more comprehensive view on the everyday lives of a certain group of people located in the same place or sharing some characteristic and they try to capture both what people do and what they think and experience. Other studies are narrower and focus on, for example, attitudes towards food or how computers are used or should be designed. In other words Nordic everyday life research is hard to define clearly. The limited analysis and the fact that the international field of everyday life research is not well known, do not allow conclusions to be drawn about either a typically Nordic character of everyday life research, or differences between the Nordic countries. However, the work of mapping Nordic everyday life research will continue and the plans of constructing an open-access Everyday Life Research Database that will be easily accessible on the Internet are presented. 3 Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 5 Method ................................................................................................................................... 7 The search procedure ......................................................................................................... 7 The reference database ..................................................................................................... 11 Analyzing what Nordic everyday life research may be about ......................................... 11 Result .................................................................................................................................... 12 Total number of references .............................................................................................. 12 Most frequent authors (more than two references) .......................................................... 12 Reference types ................................................................................................................ 14 Dissertations ..................................................................................................................... 15 Journals ............................................................................................................................. 17 Attempting to characterize Nordic everyday life research ................................................... 20 Constructing a database of Nordic everyday life research ................................................... 22 Aims of the database ........................................................................................................ 22 Defining and finding everyday life research .................................................................... 22 Appendix 1 ........................................................................................................................... 24 Appendix 2 ........................................................................................................................... 32 References Sweden .......................................................................................................... 32 References Finland ........................................................................................................... 48 References Denmark ........................................................................................................ 66 References Norway .......................................................................................................... 76 References Iceland ........................................................................................................... 86 4 Introduction Linköping University has had a research network on Everyday Life Research since 2005. Researchers representing different disciplines, subject fields, and methodological approaches participate in the network, sharing in common an interest in doing research grounded in the everyday lives of people. Although the interdisciplinary collaboration implies, among other things, that the concept of everyday life is understood from different theoretical perspectives, the unifying idea is that everyday life research is always performed close to people and aims at increasing knowledge about how individuals act and conceive of their lives over time and in different social and spatial contexts. The local research network is also represented in the Nordic research network on Everyday Life Processes in European Societies (ELPiES). The participants who are most involved in the running of this network come from Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. The network studies everyday life processes in time and space in the context of the ongoing modernization of European societies. ELPiES arranged two international conferences in 2008 at the University of Helsinki and in 2009 at Linköping University. A third conference will take place at Roskilde University in Denmark in May 2010. In 2008 the local network at Linköping University applied for and received money from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to conduct a literary survey of everyday life research. We, the authors, were given a free hand to formulate the aim and to define the scope of the survey. We soon realized that the scope of everyday life research can be huge, depending on what definition is used. We actually decided to start on a rather broad scale with international literature, but then to narrow down the study to Nordic literature. Now, the aim of this report is twofold. First, based on a search for international references that was performed by librarian Christina Brage we have sorted out and aim to present references that originate from the Nordic countries and that have been assigned the keyword “everyday life” or one of its Nordic counterparts, published in the period 1990 through 2008. Iceland was not included in these searches; however, a small sample of Icelandic articles published in international journals will be presented. All references are presented in the reference lists in Appendix 2. Based on this selection of references we then discuss how we might characterize Nordic everyday life research. For this purpose we describe the selection of references by highlighting the total number of references from each country, the most frequent authors and 5 the institutions to which they belong, and the reference types and the number of each type, and we also analyze what some of the literature may be about by studying some information about the dissertations and the journals that we found. Second, it is hoped that this report and the references found will form the basis for the Everyday Life Research Database that the local network on Everyday Life Research at Linköping University plans to construct in cooperation with Linköping University Electronic Press (LiU E-press). The intention is to build an open-access database that will be easily accessible