Drakar, tärningar och moralpanik : En undersökning av moralpaniken kring Dungeons & Dragons i Sverige under 1980- och 1990-talet

Sammanfattning

The tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons played a central part in the American Satanic Panic of the 1980s. A phenomenon which has since then been well researched and labeled as a moral panic. However, this fact only stands true when taking the research of American history into consideration. The purpose of this study is to research whether or not a similar moral panic concerning Dungeons & Dragons took place in Sweden during the 1980s and 1990s. Laying the foundation for this research, the royal library's database of Swedish newspapers was used in order to find the empirical material to be analyzed. During the study 58 separate articles were collected, which had originally been published in Sweden's four largest countrywide newspapers between the 1st of January 1980 and the 31st of December 1999. These articles were subsequently analyzed using the theoretical framework presented by Stanley Cohen and expanded on by Tommy Gustafsson and Klara Arnberg. The study utilizes a qualitative text analysis method in order to analyze the articles in question. The study found very clear results pointing towards the fact that a moral panic concerning the rising popularity of the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons indeed took place in Sweden. The collected articles show how the debate surrounding the roleplaying game displayed all the signs of a classic moral panic. The study also found a large number of similarities between this case of moral panic and other already established moral panics in Sweden, as well as in America.