MF CASR lunch with Andrea Rota

No Individualists in a Pandemic?

The talk presents empirical findings from a three-year research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation on the relationship between worldviews and social responsibility during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project is based on more than seventy qualitative interviews with Swiss residents of different religious and non-religious backgrounds. The talk addresses the challenge of grouping individual voices into coherent types and focuses on an open puzzle. The theoretical instrument deployed for the analysis would predict the presence of a specific “individualist” type. While such a type has been identified in research on, for example, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, it does not seem to be present in our data. How can this result be explained?

Andrea Rota is Professor in the Study of Religion at the Univerity of Oslo.