This article argues that quantitative secularization research has made important progress in the last 20 years in seven areas. We have gained knowledge of how religion and religiosity are connected to insecurity, education, socialization, secular transition, secular competition, pluralism, and regulation. This has led to a better understanding of the causes and the form of the secularization process. In this article, the author discusses the new ideas that have led to these advances, the evidence that supports the claims, and the new problems that have appeared due to the progress made.
The article presents a unified theoretical model, explaining differences in Christian and 'alternative' religiosity at individual and collective levels. The model reconstructs and integrates the most important theories explaining religiosity (deprivation, regulation, socialization, cultural production, and ethnicity) as complementary causal mechanisms in a rational-action based framework. It is maintained that the mechanisms of the various theories are not exclusive, but complementary, and that integration into the general model is both theoretically and empirically beneficial. The model is tested on representative data from Switzerland. Substantively, I find for the Swiss case that Christian religiosity can be best explained by a religious socialization mechanism. The most important mechanisms accounting for alternative religiosity involve deprivation, gender, and age.
English In spite of the tremendous success of the concept of “religious markets”, it has remained unclear just what “religious goods” are and if, and under what conditions, a “religious market” actually exists in a given society. The author integrates different concepts from rational choice theorists and Max Weber into a new typology of individual and social religious goods. The typology shows that markets are only one possibility among others of producing, exchanging and allocating religious goods. It also helps an understanding of the kind of conditions in which markets may or may not be important theoretical tools. French En dépit du succès fulgurant que connaît le concept de "marché religieux'', la signification de ce que l'on entend par "bien religieux'' n'en est pas clarifiée pour autant, de même que les conditions qui permettraient de parler de "marché religieux'' dans une société donnée. L'auteur revisite différents concepts des théoriciens du choix rationnel ainsi que de Max Weber et les intègre dans une nouvelle typologie des biens religieux individuels et sociaux. Celle-ci montre que les marchés n'offrent qu'une manière parmi d'autres de produire, d'échanger et de distribuer les biens religieux. Elle permet également de mieux comprendre à quelles conditions le marché peut être considéré comme un outil théorique pertinent.
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The question of how and with what methods the social sciences should explain phenomena is fiercely contested. While several scholars have argued that mixed methods may help to improve sociological explanations, there is a lack of highly visible examples that show the added value of this methodology. The goal of this paper is to show that the case of the Titanic, and the question of who survived and for what reasons, can be seen as such an example. The Titanic tragedy is the most well-known maritime disaster of modern history, and the Titanic dataset is a widely used and first-rate example for the teaching of mono-method statistical explanation. We demonstrate that a mixed-method explanation is superior to a mono-method explanation in that it clarifies not only the relationships between variables, but also the mechanisms that led to the co-variations. Among the most important mechanisms, we find that the rule "women and children first" was interpreted differently by different actors, and that this, together with the fact that different classes of passengers had different levels of access to the boat deck, explains much of the gender/ class differences in terms of survival that we can observe. We conclude by discussing the lessons that can be drawn from the example for sociological explanatory work more generally.
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