Faculty of social sciences research infrastructure
Here you will find collected information about the research infrastructure within the faculty of social sciences. Resources are very varied in nature, and there is no sharp definition of what constitutes infrastructure.
Old aerial photos - new gold mine for researchers
Department of Economic History
Database on historical monetary and financial statistics for Sweden
This database compiles and makes available historical monetary and financial statistics for Sweden from 1668; some of the time series date back to the Middle Ages. It also constructs time series that are consistent over time and applies contemporary definitions in order to facilitate long-term analyses of, for example, house prices, the relationship between monetary aggregates and inflation, and macroeconomic development. Few such databases cover such a long time span; officially produced monetary statistics usually only go back one or two decades. The website hosting these data is very busy, but there are no resources to update it.
Web site: http://www.historicalstatistics.org/
Department of Computer and Systems Sciences
Health Bank
The Swedish Health Record Research Bank (or “Health Bank” for short) contains about two million anonymised patient records from Karolinska University Hospital, 2006–2014. The infrastructure contains both structured and unstructured information. The structured data include a unique serial number for each patient, as well as their gender, age, admission and discharge timestamps, ICD-10 diagnosis codes, ATC drug codes, blood and laboratory values, body temperature, etc. The unstructured data consist of free-form text, such as notes by doctors and nurses, filed under different headings for each patient/serial number. There is a large set of manually annotated textual data that can be used for machine learning training, for example named entities, clinical entities, symptoms, diagnoses, drugs, body parts, classifications of adverse events, such as health care associated infections, sepsis and adverse drug effects, as well as a large set of developed natural language processing tools.
Director for Health Bank: Professor Hercules Dalianis hercules@dsv.su.se
Department of Education
The Malmö Survey
The Malmö Survey was conducted in 1937-38 by Siver Hallgren and encompassed 1,542 children. It was presented in his 1939 licentiate thesis, “Intelligens och miljö samt en del därmed sammanhängande problem: en experimentell undersökning av barn i tredje skolåret vid Malmö folkskolor och privata skolor I-II” [Intelligence, environment and related problems: an experimental study of third-graders in Malmö], and has been followed up several times, including in the end of the 1940s when the boys in the study were tested in connection with their military service screening. One of the latest articles using data from the survey is O'Dowd in Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 35:3, 2005.
Web site: http://www.edu.su.se/english/institute-of-international-education
Department of Criminology
Stockholm Life Course Project (SLCP)
The collected data comprise more than 15,000 individuals divided into five “family trees”. The source groups are called Clientele Crime, Clientele Controls, SKÅ, Normal and SiS. What Clientele Crime, SKÅ and SiS have in common is that they have a background of delinquency or antisocial problems in their youth. All of these groups, except for SiS, belong to a generation born between the late 1930s and the early 1950s. SiS were born in the later 1960 or early 1970s. The collected registry data covers education, work, health, economy, housing conditions, etc.
Web site: http://www.criminology.su.se/forskning/forskningsprojekt/the-stockholm-life-course-project
Department of Human Geography
The Geoprocessing Unit
The Geoprocessing Unit at the Department of Human Geography works with spatial data created using digital technology and intended for use in geographical information systems (GIS). The Unit develops methodology and provides support for research projects using GIS. The Unit coordinates courses and programmes in GIS and cartography, as well as hosts the IDRISI Resource Centre at Stockholm University: a raster-based GIS software application. Information from several research projects is available on the Unit’s website. In addition, the Unit has participated in the University Library’s construction of historical spatial data.
Web site: http://www.humangeo.su.se/geodataenheten
GEOSTAR
GEOSTAR is related to the demographers’ STAR data (see below under SOFI), but includes more geographical data, such as the geographical coordinates of individuals, properties and workplaces.
In the project "Geografisk kontext: Ett nytt sätt att mäta vad omgivningen betyder för individens livsbana" [Geographical context: A new way of measuring the significance of the social environment for the life course of individuals], which has access to GEOSTAR, the aim is to use a new method to answer the question of how individuals’ social context outside of their families affect their attitudes and conduct.
Are children and adolescents affected by their neighbourhood when it comes to their life course? Are different cohorts and groups affected in different ways? How does the scale of measure affect the significance of the social environment? GEOSTAR contains data from 1990 to 2013.
Contact person: Eva Andersson eva.andersson@humangeo.su.se
Department of Economics
Historical Database of Sweden (HDS)
This digitises archive material from Statistics Sweden, the National Board of Health and Welfare, the National Board of Trade, the National Board of Education, Lantmäteriet (the Swedish mapping, cadastral and land registration authority), the Military Archives, the Ministry of Education and Ecclesiastical Affairs, as well as municipal and regional archives, in order to create unique historical statistics. It includes, for example, detailed industrial statistics at the company level since 1892, details on all land reforms at the village level since 1749, population statistics at the municipal level since 1749, educational statistics, agriculture and harvests, voting rights and election outcomes, child welfare statistics, etc.
Contact: Per Pettersson Lidbom pp@ne.su.se
Department of Psychology and Stress Research Institute
Gösta Ekman's Laboratory
(GEL; named after the Swedish figurehead of perceptual psychology, Gösta Ekman.) This is the home of the research unit for Perception and Psychophysics. The research focuses on how we perceive the world around us using our senses of sight, hearing and smell. For example, we study the psychological effects of noise, how our sense of smell can be used to detect dementia, how blind people can learn to navigate using other senses, and how people with an irrational fear of spiders can unlearn their strong emotional reactions. GEL has specially adapted experiment rooms for advanced scent exposure, sound reproduction and registration of brain activity and eye movement. It is an international research environment with representation from over a dozen nationalities and funding from several major external research grants.
Contact: Maria Larsson maria.larsson@psychology.su.se
Stockholm University Brain Imaging Centre (SUBIC)
Stockholm University Brain Imaging Centre (SUBIC) is a new strategic initiative by Stockholm University. SUBIC will provide an infrastructure for brain imaging research with a focus on human and animal brain functions. The research conducted at SUBIC will cover linguistic and behavioural fields in the humanities and social sciences, as well as law, zoology, mathematics and other disciplines in the natural sciences. SUBIC will be a unique facility in Sweden, with multidisciplinary research opportunities across all faculties. SUBIC will initially be managed by the Department of Linguistics, but is a collaborative effort between several departments at Stockholm University. The Departments of Psychology, Linguistics and Zoology have been the driving forces behind bringing SUBIC to Stockholm University. SUBIC’s physical location will be in the Arrhenius Laboratory, which has facilities that can be adapted to the operation’s security, accessibility and technical requirements. Head: Francisco Lacerda francisco.lacerda@ling.su.se
Web site: http://www.su.se/subic/
Betula
The Betula Project is a unique study of psychological and health-related changes in the ageing population. The participants of the project have been tested, interviewed and medically and psychologically examined on six occasions with five-year intervals between 1990 and 2015. The project aims to study how memory functions change throughout adult life, as well as identify risk factors for dementia and early preclinical signs of dementia. The database has been supplemented with biological data, such as genes, metabolites, viruses and brain imaging. In 2005, the Swedish Research Council named the Betula Project one of ten leading research environments in Sweden.
Web site: http://www.psychology.su.se/english/research/research-groups/the-betula-project
IDA
In IDA, more than 2,000 school children have been followed from the age of 10-13 into adulthood in order to study adaptation processes. Important research areas include the process of choosing an education and a profession, the development of social adaptation, psychological explanations for health in the middle-age years, as well as explanatory factors for subjective well-being in the middle-age years.
Web site: http://www.psychology.su.se/forskning/forskningsprogram/individuell-utveckling-och-adaptation/individuell-utveckling-och-adaptation-ida-1.32919
SLOSH (Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health)
SLOSH is a cohort consisting of the 40,926 people who responded to the Swedish Work Environment Surveys (SWES) in 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009 or 2011, which makes the survey fairly representative of the Swedish working population 2003-2011. The data in SLOSH are collected through questionnaires that are sent to the participants every two years, starting in 2006 (when only the respondents recruited from SWES 2003 participated), and linked to registry data. The annual data collection in 2014 had 20,316 respondents, and the data collection in 2016 was still in progress when this text was updated. Additional follow-ups are planned for a long time to come. The aim of SLOSH is to examine the longitudinal connections between work organisation, work environment (particularly the psychosocial environment), labour market participation and health, taking into account social conditions, individual differences, health behaviours and coping strategies, the interaction between work and private life, sleep, ageing and cyclical fluctuations. SLOSH is also part of a consortium which, with the help of coordination grants from the Swedish Research Council, is planning to establish a national infrastructure for research on relationships, work and health over the course of life.
Web site: www.slosh.se
Stockholm University’s sleep laboratory
The sleep laboratory contains three temperature-controlled bedrooms that are insulated from external environmental factors, such as noise and light.
It also contains a kitchen and a bathroom. The laboratory has special equipment for recording and analysing polysomnography (EEG – the electrical activity of the brain; EOG – eye movements; and EMG – muscle activity), breathing and heart rates. It is also possible to carry out computerised performance tests in the laboratory. The equipment for recording polysomnography can also be used in field studies. In addition, the laboratory has more than 20 activity sensors (so-called “actigraphs”) for monitoring sleep in field studies.
Web site: www.stressforskning.su.se/forskning/sömn-och-vakenhet/sömnlaboratoriet
Department of Sociology
A Swedish "Generations and Gender Survey " (GGS)
A survey with an associated database of contextual data. A Swedish GGS may lead to new knowledge about decision-making processes concerning family formation and reproduction; how subjective values affect such decisions and relationships within families and between generations; how gender covariates with various decisions during the life cycle; how different events during the life cycle are related; as well as provide a greater understanding of society’s role in the creation of different working and family conditions. 9,688 people participated in the Swedish survey. The data were collected by Statistics Sweden in 2012-2013. The demographic results will be followed up using registry data. GGSs are also being conducted in a large number of other European countries in the context of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP).
Web site: http://www.suda.su.se/ggs/
Young Adult Panel Study (YAPS)
In 1999, 2003 and 2009, Statistics Sweden collected data via mail and web surveys from about 3,500 adolescents concerning attitudes, values, work and family conditions in the first stage of adulthood.
Web site: http://www.suda.su.se/yaps/
Also Stockholm University SIMSAM Node for Demographic Research (SUNDEM)
Web site: http://www.suda.su.se/simsam/
CHESS
UBCoS Multigen
Uppsala Birth Cohort Multigenerational Study is a follow-up of people born in Uppsala 1915-29, as well as their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, that contains data from historical archives, interviews and surveys. The creation and maintenance of this database has been funded by grants for large databases from the Swedish Research Council. The material offers unique opportunities to study how early life factors affect health and social position in adulthood, as well as how the transfer works between several generations. Some of the costs are associated with the purchase of registry data, but the biggest costs are associated with the collection of archive data for different generations, as well as the continuous maintenance and retrieval of data.
Web site: http://www.chess.su.se/research/data-materials/the-uppsala-birth-cohort-multigeneration-study-ubcos
HSIA
HSIA (health, illness, income and work) is a registry database with information from various population and housing censuses, as well as data concerning education, income, healthcare and mortality rates. The material covers virtually the entire population of Sweden and is used for analyses of inequalities in mortality, long-term consequences of unemployment, how income or ethnicity is related to health and mortality, etc. The costs of the database are associated with the purchase of updates, continuous maintenance and minor retrievals of data for individual researchers.
Web site: http://www.chess.su.se/research/data-materials/the-swedish-work-and-mortality-database-hsia-wmb
Also SWEOLD: http://www.sweold.se/
Also part-owner of SBC (Stockholm Birth Cohort), see http://www.stockholmbirthcohort.su.se/ and SOFI.
SOFI
Level of Living Survey (LNU)
In the 1968 Level of Living Survey, respondents were asked about their actual living conditions (as opposed to their attitudes and perceptions). The questions were answered by approximately one in every thousand Swedes aged 15-75 (later 18-75) and were concerned with childhood conditions, family, education, work, health, economy, housing, household work, leisure time, etc. The panel approach makes it possible to follow people’s living conditions over time and causally relate them to each other. Subsequent rounds of the survey (1974, 1981, 1991, 2000 and 2010) largely collected the same information. The period between each survey is filled in with biographies of family conditions, education and employment. Since the year 2000, the spouses/partners of the main respondents also respond to a short mail questionnaire with questions about their living conditions, and the children (aged 10-18) in the household respond to questions via a so-called “audio questionnaire”.
Web site: http://www.sofi.su.se/forskning/tre-forskningsavdelningar/lnu
Stockholm Birth Cohort Study – Born in Sweden in the 1950s
All boys and girls who were born in 1953 and lived in the Stockholm metropolitan area in 1963 were offered to participate in a school survey (the Metropolitan Study). More than 15,000 individuals participated in the study. A selection of the mothers responded to interview questions, and a follow-up survey on recreational habits was conducted in 1985. Registry data on the children as newborns, as well as their parents’ social and financial conditions during childhood, have complemented the study. The study was anonymised in 1985, but a follow-up of the individuals who were still alive in 1980 was made possible through “probability matching” or “variable matching”. This allowed for registry data concerning work, unemployment, income, family conditions and illnesses to be applied to the original cohort. Today, the study contains anonymised life-course data for the first 56 years of the individuals’ lives.
Web site: http://www.stockholmbirthcohort.su.se/
Youth in Europe Study (YES)
A comparative and longitudinal survey conducted in Sweden, England, Germany and the Netherlands. The project has a broad approach and covers issues relating to the well-being, networks and attitudes of school pupils. The study is based on a nationally representative sample of pupils in the eight and ninth grade. In addition to the pupils’ statements, separate interviews will be conducted with their legal guardians and form teachers.
Web site: http://www.sofi.su.se/english/research/three-research-departments/lnu-level-of-living/youth-in-europe
Social Policy Indicators (SPIN) Database
The SPIN database contains unique comparative data on the organisation of the welfare state from the 1930s and onwards. SPIN is the result of a deliberate, long-term investment into research infrastructure. A large number of Swedish and international researchers use SPIN data, and the database has resulted in a wide range of publications, many of which have been published in leading international journals. SPIN data are also used by government authorities and international organisations. The SPIN database is not only important to the leading research being conducted at SOFI, but also facilitates new research in Stockholm University’s profile areas, particularly in the field of “welfare and democracy”. Contact person: Kenneth Nelson, kenneth.nelson@sofi.su.se.
Web site: http://www.sofi.su.se/spin/
STAR (Sweden over Time – Activities and Relationships)
STAR consists of thirteen different sets of registry data relating to a joint study population. It is based on various data sets managed by Statistics Sweden in Örebro. The registries that the data sets are based on (e.g. RTB, LISA, the conscription registry, the scholastic aptitude test registry, the cause of death registry, and the social assistance registry) are organised by Statistics Sweden and/or other government authorities. They contain internationally unique information about, for example, family composition, education and the labour market. All data in STAR are processed using Statistics Sweden’s MONA system (Micro-Online Access via remote desktop to a server at Statistics Sweden). A similar collection of registry data is managed by the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS) at Linköping University.
Contact: erik.bihagen@sofi.su.se, SOFI and gunnar.andersson@sociology.su.se, SUDA.
Last updated: October 1, 2024
Source: The Office of Human Science