The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion

Steven Engler, Michael Stausberg, Steven Engler, Michael Stausberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000472677
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This substantially revised second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion remains the only comprehensive survey in English of methods and methodology in the discipline. Designed for non-specialists and upper undergraduate-/graduate-level students, it discusses the range of methods currently available to stimulate interest in unfamiliar methods and enable students and scholars to evaluate methodological issues in research.

The Handbook comprises 39 chapters – 21 of which are new, and the rest revised for this edition. A total of 56 contributors from 10 countries cover a broad range of topics divided into three clear parts:

• Methodology

• Methods

• Techniques

The first section addresses general methodological issues: including comparison, research design, research ethics, intersectionality, and theorizing/analysis. The second addresses specific methods: including advanced computational methods, autoethnography, computational text analysis, digital ethnography, discourse analysis, experiments, field research, grounded theory, interviewing, reading images, surveys, and videography. The final section addresses specific techniques: including coding, focus groups, photo elicitation, and survey experiments.

Each chapter covers practical issues and challenges, theoretical bases, and their use in the study of religion/s, illustrated by case studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion is essential reading for students and researchers in the study of religion/s, as well as for those in related disciplines.

PART I Methodology

1.1 INTRODUCTION Methods, methodology and method in the study of religion/s

Steven Engler and Michael Stausberg

DOI: 10.4324/9781003222491-2

Chapter summary

• Methods are skills, techniques and tools used to answer research questions.
• Methodology is reflection on methods, from discussion or comparison of technical details to more general theory of methods.
• In the study of religion/s, ‘method’ in the singular often overlaps with theory and meta-theory, as a discussion of ‘approaches’.
• Comparable discussions of ‘method’ in the latter sense in other disciplines underline the value of analyzing key concepts in particular social contexts.
• Methodological issues include research design, quantitative and qualitative methods and assessment criteria (reliability, validity and generalizability).

The study of religion/s (SoR) as a discipline tends to neglect issues of methods and methodology.¹ As the chapters of this Handbook (with their many references) show, important work has been published over the last decade, since the first edition of this Handbook in 2011 – surprisingly, the first volume in English ever dedicated to research methods in our discipline. Methods are seldom discussed in introductory textbooks.² There are many ‘theory and methods’ courses, but – with important exceptions – most still treat methods, if at all, as another way of talking about theory. ‘Method’ comes first in the title of the one SoR journal that features it – Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (MTSR) – but there is almost nothing in the pages of that journal on research methods or methodology specifically. That journal's most well-known example illustrates how scholars of religion/s tend to talk theory when they refer to methods. As Bruce Lincoln notes, his influential ‘Theses on Method’ (1996) ‘are less a discussion of method than an attempt to foster an attitude’ (2005: 62; see Engler and Gardiner 2013). The example of MTSR and related publications illustrates that, in SoR, ‘method’ often points to highly abstract conceptual and ideological debates about ‘approaches’ and theoretical issues, not to research methods (see McCutcheon 2013; Stoddard 2018).

The reason for the neglect of methods in SoR – as opposed to ‘method’ – is not the lack of a particular research method or the presence of too many. It cannot be that SoR has only one method: this book would not exist if that were true. Some of the fault lies with our tradition of humanistic education. SoR is informed by a subject (‘religion’, including its constructions), not by a way of study. Data, methods and theories are chosen more or less accidentally: to throw light on the subject: they are tools. Refining methods or developing new ones is typically not considered a major ambition. Methodological innovation most often consists in the adoption of methods from other fields and disciplines.

Methodological competence does not come out of nowhere: it must be acquired. This pedagogical issue – how methods are taught – is crucial. Our main goal in editing the two editions of this book has been to produce a tool for teaching and learning, to help students and scholars in SoR to think about, to assess, to choose and to use methods.

Methods, methodology, method

Methods are the techniques, tools and processes used to select, collect, filter, operationalize, fine-tune, analyze and enact (Law 2004) the subject matter, empirical materials or data of research. All students and scholars need to pay attention to questions of methods when they contemplate and plan a study. How do I choose what to look at and work with, as I try to make sense of some phenomenon, topic or issue? How do I get my hands on what sort of materials? How do I know when I have enough material? How do I organize it? How do I move from that chaotic pile of ‘data’ to publishable results? How do I ‘analyze’, ‘conceptualize’, ‘operationalize’ or ‘theorize’ the materials I am working with? How do I know if I am on the wrong track and need to rethink or fine-tune what I am doing? In general, what stuff should I study, how do I get my hands on it and how do I make sense of it when I’ve got it?

Methods are indispensable to any academic enterprise, and they are complex and dynamic. There are more and less adequate, acceptable and promising methods for a given purpose and academic context. Different types of scholarship make more productive use of some methods than others. All methods are selective: they impose limited perspectives and choose among potential sets of empirical materials or data. No method guarantees success. Methods are not beyond critique. Established, institutionalized or popular methods are not the only ways of obtaining relevant knowledge (though scientific methods are the only generally recognized way of obtaining scientific knowledge). Methods are not a straitjacket; they allow for creativity and new vision. Not everything can be planned out, nor can every plan be put into practice. Research is often steered more by external constraints, by improvisation and by bricolage than by a masterplan. Methodological competence yields solid work, but brilliant work is often the result of serendipity. Like all good tools, methods are refined in use: some wear out and are replaced; they are repurposed or reoriented in response to novel situations that turn up along the way; or they are rethought or rejected in response to perceived methodological hegemony or imperialism (Law 2004).

Methodology is reflection on methods, at a technical or more general level. In the latter case, it blurs into theory of methods and epistemology.³ At its most basic, the term stands as shorthand for ‘knowing how to use methods’: methodological expertise comes from experience in selecting and proceeding with particular methods. This underlines the importance of having a feel for a wide range of relevant methodological options. To paraphrase Müller on religions, they who know one know none. Methodology begins with basic description of the methods that were used in a given study. It includes issues of research design, relations between qualitative and quantitative methods and triangulation, each discussed later. It can include issues of assessing how effective those methods were as used. For example, in a chapter titled ‘Methodology for Comparative Research on the Main Currents of Islam’, Marziyeh Bakhshizadeh begins, ‘Now the methods used in my research will be discussed …’ and ends with a brief look at ‘criteria to assess the procedure and results of research’ (2018: 53, 59).

Method – in the singular and often associated with ‘scientific method’ – complicates any sharp distinction between methods as techniques and methodology as reflection on methods. In the first place, there is a methodological spectrum here, not a distinction.⁴ If we define methods as technique of working with data, then this includes analysis, conceptual work and theorizing. Concepts and theories are also data (for example, in meta-theory), and data are generated first through methods. Methods are used along a spectrum, from narrow empirical techniques all the way to highly abstract work, i.e., to general ‘approaches’: phenomenological, ethnographical, semiotic, sociological, Marxist etc. In SoR, ‘method’ in the singular generally points to the latter, more abstract type of conceptual work. Here, method overlaps with theory and meta-theory: all are ways of thinking about (studying) religion. It is in this sense that MTSR, like SoR as a whole, has little to say of methods but much to say of method.

‘Method’, in this sense, often blurs into ‘methodology’. In SoR, both these terms are often used as a general way of referring to different ‘schools and research trends’ (Hoffmann 2010: 236). We can contrast research methods at the empirical end of the methodological spectrum with method-as-approach at the other. For example, a discussion of methodological pluralism in SoR can include ‘such obviously “spiritual methods” as Eliade's new humanism’ (Geertz and McCutcheon 2000: 8). Expanding the scope of ‘method’ and ‘methodology’ to include all established intellectual paths that purport to produce knowledge will necessarily embrace explicitly theological approaches: e.g., mystical (Sufi) and juristic (Shari’a-based) ‘methodologies’ in Islam (Malkawi 2014).

‘Method’, in the broad, abstract sense, is especially prominent in ‘critical’ SoR.⁵ Christopher M. Driscoll and Monica R. Miller's book Method as Identity is a prominent recent example of this. Discussing not research methods but method as an ideological category, it ‘treats method as an identity-revealing technique of distance making’ (2019: 1). The book's core claims are that flawed method in SoR has contributed to the marginalization of certain groups in society and to the silencing of their voices, and that new, critical method can ‘rightfully place “identity” (and its operational acts) at the center of the study of religion’ (Driscoll and Miller 2019: 25). The goal is ‘both the application of critical methods within the study of religion, and … to apply such methods to key themes and concepts within “critical” debates about the “proper” way to study “religion”’ (Driscoll and Miller 2019: 80). This makes experience and identity central to methodology:

many of us have grown exceptionally adept at identifying social/rhetorical techniques and theological sleights-of-hand … [and at] methodological refutation of the confessional/experiential enterprise…. Taking such an action-oriented outlook on identity seriously requires recognizing that we may now be lodged between two interpretive strategies for our (critical) work: our method as our identity or our identity as our method. We can seek to escape the perilous claims to experience that have plagued academic rigor by localizing our energy into ‘method’ to such an extent that it serves as proxy for the identities whose influence on knowledge production we often deny. Or, we can transform experiences into a method undercutting methodological applicability across domains with a simple, politically charged rejection of such an effort.

(Driscoll and Miller 2019: 27)

Method, in this sense, is a social process (and methodology is ideological critique): ‘the comparative method is identity formation and process. Whose identity, then, are we (re)producing when we engage in “proper” method?’ (Driscoll and Miller 2019: 19). This refocusing of ‘method’ takes for granted the issue of research methods, i.e., the issue that motivates this Handbook: exactly what techniques, working with which sorts of materials allow students and scholars to best proceed with the tasks of ‘identifying social/rhetorical techniques and … methodological refutation’?

There is much to learn from a comparable debate on ‘method’ in East Asian cultural studies, sparked by Yoshimi Takeuchi's lecture ‘Asia as Method’ (2005 [1960]). Takeuchi moved past static anti-imperialistic discourse to argue that Asia and the West constitute each other, and that ‘the Orient must re-embrace the West, it must change the West itself’; and he suggested that the resulting ‘rollback of cultur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsements Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Contributors
• PART I Methodology
• PART II Methods
• PART III Techniques
• Index