Abstract
What are the most important questions in the sociology of religion? And how would scholars answer them? This article explores what people consider the most important questions in the field. Sociologists tend to study what we can readily answer with data, but the questions that elicit the most interest turn out to be quite different. They are bigger, broader, and harder to answer empirically. A crowd-sourced poll identified what people consider the most important questions in the sociology of religion, which were then posed to scholars in the field. They provided nuanced and complex answers revealing a diversity of approaches involved in the study of religion. This unorthodox article invites the reader to listen in on dynamic conversations that bring scholars into dialogue with one another, revealing points of consensus, ongoing debate, areas where there are more questions than answers, and directions for future work.
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Poll information/data can be found here: https://www.allourideas.org/sociologyofreligion/results.
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Notes
To field the poll, we used the All Our Ideas platform. All Our Ideas is a research project seeking to develop a new outside-in approach to social science that combines the best features of quantitative and qualitative methods. It has the scale, speed, and quantification of a survey while still allowing for new information to “bubble up” from respondents as typically happens in interviews, participant observation, and focus groups (Salganik & Levy, 2015). All Our Ideas is an open-source research project led by Matthew Salganik of Princeton University and funded by Google, NSF, World Bank, and Princeton. Their data collection and processing procedures have been approved by the Princeton University Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects (protocol #4885). The platform works as follows. The poll creator posts a prompt (in this case, “Which question is more important in the sociology of religion?”) and ideas (in this case answers to the prompt which took the form of questions) to pre-populate the poll with initial options. When on the site, poll takers are presented with a series of opportunities to “vote” for the option they prefer between two ideas taken at random from the larger list (if they cannot decide they can indicate as such). They’re also provided a text box where they can propose additional ideas that will be included among the options voters see going forward. While we were open to what people entered as new options, people participating in the poll could also flag questions as inappropriate. If flagged, the question was deactivated as an option until it could be reviewed (we ultimately did not reactivate any of the three questions that were flagged, which included comments on the poll rather than questions, aggressive language, or incomplete questions). Scoring on the AllOurIdeas platform works as follows (Salganik & Levy, 2015): The score for each idea (i.e., proposed option for the poll) is the estimated chance it will “win” (i.e., be selected) over a randomly chosen idea based on past voting patterns. For example, a score of 100 means that based on past responses the idea is predicted to win every time when pitted against another and a score of 0 means the idea is predicted to lose every time.
The nature of the platform and how people were asked to participate means those who completed the poll were a range of people from experts to the general public. The platform does not collect background information on respondents so we do not have extensive information on who cast votes, but we do know that was influenced by the networks of people in the course. The instructor and the students shared the poll with friends, family, on social media, and with the expert interview participants.
Interviews with Eman Abdelhadi, Michael Hout, Jelani Ince, Nicolette Manglos-Weber, Richard Pitt, John Schmalzbauer, and Phil Zuckerman were conducted in class via video chat. Students conducted one-on-one interviews with Joseph Baker, Titus Hjelm, and Ilana Horwitz over video chat outside of class. Melissa Wilde was interviewed by a student in-person during a campus visit to give a lecture on her recent book (Wilde, 2019). Roger Finke and Salma Mousa provided responses via email.
Some only responded to certain questions and as a result do not appear as frequently as others below.
See, for example, Norris and Inglehart (2011).
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There are four authorship categories within which authors are listed alphabetically: LS conceived the project, designed the study, created the poll, oversaw interviews, and wrote and revised the manuscript. KAZ, BH, and AP assisted LS with logistics, writing, and revising. AC, AC, AH, ML, and IP were students in the seminar in which the project was carried out (AP was also in the class). They assisted in project development, conducted interviews, wrote the initial draft for one of the ten questions, and participated in final revision to various extents. EA, JB, RF, TH, IH, MH, JI, NMW, SM, RP, JS, MW, and PZ were experts interviewed for the project who also participated in final revision to various extents.
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Schnabel, L., Zaslavsky, K.A., Haggard, B. et al. An Invitation to the Sociology of Religion: Important Questions Answered by Scholars in the Field. Am Soc 54, 445–465 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-023-09578-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-023-09578-z