Between Construction and Deconstruction of the Universes of Meaning

Among young people, symptoms of social change emerge in a multiple manner. This observation by Karl Mannheim inspired the concept of the survey of social and religious attitudes conducted by the integrated research team of employees of the Department of Sociology of Religion in the Institute of Sociology at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw and Institute for Catholic Church Statistics SAC. The title of the book is an intentional reference to the concept of social constructionism. This idea manifests itself in the subjective function of participants of an interaction who reconstruct social contexts in the course of the interaction on the basis of symbolic meanings. The conducted survey is a diachronic measurement with statistical time series of the years 1988 – 1998 – 2005 – 2017. The survey uses the research tool in which dimensions were primarily established by Charles Glock and Rodney Stark and a community component by Ohio Fukuyama. The term ‘global profession of faith’ was introduced by French sociologists Louis Dingemans and Jean Rémy to describe motivation and dynamics of changes of one’s individual religiousness and identification of individuals with religious group of reference. In this survey of social and religious attitudes of young university students, religiousness dimensions adopted by forms of activity on the Internet were added to the research tool.

Sławomir Henryk Zaręba is a sociologist, Full Professor, Head of the Department of Sociology of Religion and Dean of the Faculty of Historical and Social Sciences of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. His main research areas include sociology of religion, culture, morality, youth and professional ethos.

Marcin Zarzecki, Ph.D., is a sociologist of religion, methodologist of social sciences and statistics. He is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Historical and Social Sciences of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. His main research areas include social and religious movements, sociology of politics and economic sociology.