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

Dominik Balazka; Dick Houtman; Bruno Lepri

doi:10.1016/j.patter.2021.100263

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

Patterns (N Y). 2021 Jun 11;2(6):100263. doi: 10.1016/j.patter.2021.100263.

Authors

Dominik Balazka^{1

2}, Dick Houtman³, Bruno Lepri⁴

Affiliations

¹ University of Milan, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Milan, Lombardy 20122, Italy.
² University of Turin, Department. of Cultures, Politics and Society, Turin, Piedmont 10124, Italy.
³ KU Leuven, Center for Sociological Research, Faculty of Social Sciences, Leuven, Flemish Brabant 3000, Belgium.
⁴ Bruno Kessler Foundation, Mobile and Social Computing Lab, Trento, Trentino-Alto Adige 38100, Italy.

Abstract

The shift of attention from the decline of organized religion to the rise of post-Christian spiritualities, anti-religious positions, secularity, and religious indifference has coincided with the deconstruction of the binary distinction between "religion" and "non-religion"-initiated by spirituality studies throughout the 1980s and recently resumed by the emerging field of non-religion studies. The current state of cross-national surveys makes it difficult to address the new theoretical concerns due to (1) lack of theoretically relevant variables, (2) lack of longitudinal data to track historical changes in non-religious positions, and (3) difficulties in accessing small and/or hardly reachable sub-populations of religious nones. We explore how user profiling, text analytics, automatic image classification, and various research designs based on the integration of survey methods and big data can address these issues as well as shape non-religion studies, promote its institutionalization, stimulate interdisciplinary cooperation, and improve the understanding of non-religion by redefining current methodological practices.

Keywords: Big Data; automatic image classification; data harmonization; interdisciplinarity; non-religion studies; secularity; text mining; user profiling.

Publication types

Review