SMRE approach

The Swiss Metadatabase of Religious Affiliation in Europe (SMRE) follows a comparative approach. It collects and evaluates the wealth of existing data on religious affiliation country by country across Europe. In a first phase, over the course of three years, data from a wide range of sources have been collected by the SMRE team of the University of Lucerne. In its second phase (2015-2018), the metadatabase has been moved to this newly designed SMRE web-application for easy data retrieval and analyses for all scientists and people interested.

Currently the metadatabase includes statistics on religious affiliation for 50 European countries covering two periods of reporting, namely 2000 (1996-2005) and 2010 (2006-2015).

The subsequent pages offer a more detailed description on:

• Method
• Metadatabase
• Religious affiliation
• Error sorting out
• Degree of pluralisation
• Country data quality
• SMRE estimates