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 through2008. The presentation includes information on the total number of references from eachcountry, the most frequent authors and the institutions to which they belong, and the referencetypes and the number of each type. Based on an analysis of some limited information aboutthe dissertations and the journals, it is discussed how Nordic everyday life research may becharacterized.
In total 560 references were found in the search procedure that is described in the report. Thenumber 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 ofvarious social science subjects, but also to quite a great extent within subjects of healthscience, and to a minor extent within technology subjects. Some of the references seem torepresent studies with a more comprehensive view on the everyday lives of a certain group ofpeople located in the same place or sharing some characteristic and they try to capture bothwhat 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. Inother words Nordic everyday life research is hard to define clearly. The limited analysis andthe fact that the international field of everyday life research is not well known, do not allowconclusions to be drawn about either a typically Nordic character of everyday life research, ordifferences between the Nordic countries. However, the work of mapping Nordic everydaylife research will continue and the plans of constructing an open-access Everyday LifeResearch Database that will be easily accessible on the Internet are presented.