A Study of Articles on Religion in Major Sociology Journals: Some Preliminary Findings

Attaining “a Sophisticated Maturity:” A Brief History of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

“…We cannot claim a systematic check on reliability (inter-judge or otherwise), but our deliberations on the classification process always yielded an immediate concurrence, so we know that our agreement rate would be high. Also, our classification system is quite similar to that described by others (e.g., Buehler et al 1972), although it is much more detailed and comprehensive than anything that has appeared in the literature so far. The space that we have been allotted here will limit severely the kind and number of graphic presentations that we can include with this narrative, but these will at least illustrate the kinds of analysis possible with our data.…”

“…In this respect, JSSR has been pretty much in line with trends established early on in the major journals of sociology (Buehler et al 1972) but somewhat in contrast to the other social science journals at mid-century. Samuel Klausner (1 964 found that between 1950 and 1960 fewer than half of the social science articles on religion in major journals had been based on questionnaires and about a fourth each on interviews and documents.…”

“…Methods and Data: Editors and readers of JSSR have shown a strong preference for quantitative studies over other kinds of scholarship: Two-thirds of all the articles in JSSR k history have been quantitative in nature, with the remaining third divided among qualitative, theoretical, historical, biographical, and other kinds of essays. In this respect, JSSR has been pretty much in line with trends established early on in the major journals of sociology (Buehler et al 1972) but somewhat in contrast to the other social science journals at mid-century. Samuel Klausner (1 964 found that between 1950 and 1960 fewer than half of the social science articles on religion in major journals had been based on questionnaires and about a fourth each on interviews and documents.…”

“…Of course, given the political environment of the civil rights era, one would have expected many JSSR articles on prejudice and the associated qualities of authoritarianism and dogmatism, particularly as consequences of different kinds of religiosity. Buehler et al (1972), indeed, found prejudice a major preoccupation of JSSR during its first decade, and one surely does see a dozen or so such articles, some-but not all-related to Allport's framework. For almost all of them, "prejudice" referred to black-white relations, rather than to anti-Semitism or other kinds of prejudice.…”

How can big data shape the field of non-religion studies? And why does it matter?

“…9,10 While certain areas of cultural studies recently displayed an increased interest in big data analytics, [11][12][13] computational approaches to religion remain sporadic. Recent developments in the sociology of religion, despite deeply grounded fascinations with quantitative methods, 14 have pushed multiple scholars into more qualitative directions. [15][16][17] The result is that only 0.06% of 139,368 papers about religion in Web of Science databases for the years 2012-2020 explicitly engage with or make use of big data.…”