Studying Faith: Qualitative Methodologies for Studying Religious Communities

Social scientists answer this question in a number of ways. The two most common methodologies are quantitative and qualitative studies. Neither the qualitative approach nor the quantitative approach is inherently superior, but they are very different ways of conducting research.

Some researchers choose to gather quantitative data through surveys (check out the website for the National Study of Youth and Religion research project for examples). Researchers can administer the same surveys and questionnaires in different countries to build multi-national datasets. They can administer them in different decades to track changes over time.

Here we will focus exclusively on qualitative methods. Fieldwork is the cornerstone research methodology of any qualitative ethnographic research design, and it involves three distinct but interconnected activities: interviews, participant observation and taking notes.

You may now continue on, or for more details about each of these activities, you may jump ahead to the following FAQs:

• •  Interviews
    • Why should I use interviews in my research?
    • Whom should I interview?
    • How do I prepare for an interview?
    • What are typical interview questions?
    • What are some techniques and strategies for interviewing?
  • Participant observation and taking notes

Ethical Considerations of Fieldwork

Before you start any sort of qualitative research, you must first consult your college or university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). Each institution will have their own process and own expectations of the researcher and research project. If you will be studying vulnerable populations like children or prisoners, you may need to go through a more rigorous process. The IRB will need to review your research plan and grant approval before you start the fieldwork. It is imperative that you begin this process as soon as possible because it could take weeks to get approval.

The IRB approval process is not fun, but is necessary. In the past social science researchers have placed the participants in their studies into dangerous, harmful situations. The point of the process is to protect participants from potential harm and to protect both you and the university from litigation.

Objectivity is the idea that unbiased scientific or social scientific knowledge can be reliably obtained through systematic observations of an external reality. Yet, when we study religious life using qualitative methods of observation and interviews, can we truly understand what religious life means for people objectively without superimposing our own personal feelings, preferences and value judgments?

When we the researchers are the instruments of data collection and analyses, our own biases and positions in a society are inevitably involved in the study. We do not arrive into the field as blank slates. Rather, we take with us certain interpretive systems from our own culture—both its religious and irreligious norms—which can often shape how we explain and interpret other people’s spiritual and religious worlds. We can then fall into the all-too-human tendency to cast our view as the view.

This awareness about the impossibility of “pure” objectivity does not necessarily preclude us as investigators from offering an empirically accurate depiction of the world we study. Indeed, the basic insight we should have in beginning our research is to recognize that while striving for objectivity is extremely important and valuable, compete objectivity is impossible and perhaps not always desirable. Instead, we should strive for using proper methodologies that will help us understand religion in a social context and be reflective about our own biases as social beings. In the next section, we will examine how you can do just that.

Is it possible for a researcher to be objective?

In the following video, anthropologist Nalika Gajaweera discusses how being open-minded helped her maintain objectivity while conducting qualitative research.

Your instructor may provide you with some guidance concerning the group or groups to be studied, or you may pursue this investigation based on your own research interests. Either way, you can find information about different groups from organizational websites, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, online blogs, magazines and news articles, or even by a walking or driving tour of the area. Check out CRCC’s resident journalist Nick Street’s blog discussing his experience and observations walking the neighborhood of Los Feliz in Los Angeles.

However you may go about finding a field site, do consider the following issues when choosing a group:

Interest

Conduct fieldwork with a group that you are interested in learning more about. It will be more challenging and enjoyable if you chose to study something that piques your curiosity. The basis for this interest could be that you once attended a service with a friend, that one of your friends is a member or that you read or heard something intriguing about the group. Your interest could arise from any number of reasons.

Accessibility

Choose a field site that is accessible to you and that has enough activities for you to study in the time available to you. Consider the timing of the activities of religious services of the group and whether you are able to attend them regularly. Determine the time and place of religious service through any of the conventional means of learning about the events of an organization: make a phone call or send an email to the administrators, or go online and check out their calendar.

Language

Make sure you are proficient in the language that is predominantly used in the particular field site, in terms of the service, the language spoken by the majority of its members, etc. If you are not fluent in the language, bring or arrange for an interpreter.

Gatekeepers

When studying a hierarchical religious institution, seek access to the field site by getting in touch with “gate-keepers,” like managers, volunteer organizers or board members. Sometimes you can use personal contacts to facilitate access into the field site. For example, does a friend’s sister or family member attend the mosque you’re interested in studying? Speak to the person and ask them more about the mosque, its activities and its role in the community. Ask that individual to help you gain access to those with authority, such as the imam.

If you do not know a gatekeeper personally, you can likely find information about the site online. Make sure to gain permission and access before going to the field site. This can usually be done with a phone call to the church or other religious institution. If you are not able to gain access before going be sure to bring the proper identification so you can gain access once there. (See the section on legitimacy.)

How can a suitable “gatekeeper” help research access a faith community?

Watch this video to hear researcher Hebah Farrag share her experience of finding a suitable “gatekeeper” for a religious community.

Context

The socio-political context of the group you study is important. Learn about the social world surrounding the congregation and be conscious of these issues when approaching the group. Remember, the information you receive from leaders or influential members may be different than the information you receive from lay members. If there are factions or tensions in the group, be careful how you navigate the situation. In long-term fieldwork experiences, you may be asked or implicitly expected to take sides.

Legitimacy

Make sure that you bring the necessary identification and written documentation about yourself, your project and its purpose. Sometimes this may require formal letters of introduction from professors or other university paperwork. Consider in advance how you will present yourself and your research when you meet new people in the field. Consider how you will respond to questions such as: What are you doing here? What do you want to know about me/us? Who sent you? Who is funding the research? Who will benefit from this research? How long will you be here?

Confidentiality

Assure individuals of confidentiality and anonymity, or ask religious leaders for permission to use their name. Store your recorded interview data in a secure place. Do not share your research notes with your friends or family.

Religious Literacy

CRCC and the National Disaster Interfaiths Network have developed tip sheets on how to approach various religious communities. While these are written in the context of disaster relief, they can also be helpful to researchers encountering a new and unfamiliar religious group.

You will find information on expectations of dress, gender roles, how to address leaders and other basic facts about religious groups.

Click here to access these tip sheets.

Download the Disasters and Religions App

In the context of studying religious groups, fieldwork consists of deep immersion and “hanging out” in other people’s social and cultural worlds in order to capture what they experience as meaningful and significant. By observing and participating in a religious practice or ritual, and by asking questions and listening to people, the fieldworker can better grasp the ethical choices, values, meanings and truths that are distinctive to a particular spiritual or religious group. It is a process of open-ended discovery and is necessary to doin conjunction with interview methodology because, as you may find, people don’t always do what they say they do in their interviews.

Though your interviewees may clearly explain ideas or theoretical ideals in an interview, these ideas and ideals do not always correspond to the way things are really done in practice. This is why you need to go to the site of religious practice and observe what happens. Such contradictions do not necessarily mean people are lying to you. Instead, it could mean that there is a difference between what’s sanctioned or popularly accepted within a group and how people actually live and practice their faith. In fact, you may find such variance to be one of the most productive sites of critical inquiry about a group.

Keep in mind that you are the major instrument of data collection here; you will be collecting your data by observing, doing and interviewing. Unlike experimental research that relies on tests and questionnaires, as a qualitative researcher, you rely on several tools that you have carried around with you all your life: your mind and your senses. In conducting participant observation, you take these innate resources and use them in a systematic and disciplined way to collect data.

In this kind of deep immersion, you can:

• Observe and participate in the daily routines, rituals and practices of a congregation or group.
• Listen to what is being said in a service or program.
• Become familiar with the people involved in the group. Talk not only to the main clergy person, but also to other staff and members.
• Ask seemingly self-evident but insightful questions about what was seen and heard.
• You can take photographs, make diagrams and perhaps collect informant-produced maps or diagrams.
• It can be helpful to bring a small notebook to a setting and jot down notes as inconspicuously as possible.

One important item to note: make sure you write down your field notes, that is a detailed description of what happened in the setting, as soon as you can after leaving the setting. It is best to have these memories as fresh as possible for accuracy. See the following section for what these notes should contain.

Throughout this manual we refer to studying religion from the perspective of a social scientist. What makes the perspective of a social scientist so unique? In fact, why do we make the distinction at all? Is a social scientist’s perspective on a religious group so much different from that of the group’s leader, a journalist, someone who lives down the block from the group, or a person who reads about the group in the newspaper?

Though there is a lot of debate about how “scientific” sociological and anthropological studies really are (especially if they are qualitative), one of the characteristics of social scientific research is systematic data collection. Social scientists adhere to specific and rigorous sampling methods to try to understand the responses of a large group or populations.

An important tool that separates a social scientific study of religious groups from other perspectives is the use of analytical frameworks to guide the research. We do not provide an in-depth discussion of all the potential frames, theories or lenses you could use in your project (we suggest referring to your Introduction to Sociology or Anthropology textbook for further information). Our advice is that you choose a framework that highlights an interest of your own.

You could look at a congregation as a social institution, located in a place. By definition it interacts with the schools, police department, neighbors and other religious groups and is in part shaped by the economy, the housing market and its immediate material surroundings. This sort of study employs an ecological framework as it views the congregation as a living social organism that operates in a diverse, dynamic habitat. But the ecological approach is not the only option. The same congregation could be studied and analyzed with an emphasis on culture, race or gender. The key is to choose a lens that best fits both you and the group.

Why must researchers apply appropriate theoretical frameworks to their findings?

Sociologist Richard Flory discusses how to apply theoretical frameworks to analyze and make sense of qualitative data.

Here are three reasons why using frameworks is useful:

Empiricism

Theoretical frameworks help to detach the research from the researcher’s personal experience with a religious group. For example, imagine a researcher who grew up in a Mormon family in a small, predominantly Mormon city just south of Salt Lake City. The researcher is still a practicing Mormon, and for her dissertation, she is studying a Mormon Temple in rural Samoa. There is nothing inherently wrong with a practicing Mormon studying other Mormons; in fact many researchers are interested in their own faith traditions. Still, this researcher will face the challenge of trying to study this group as objectively as possible. Studying this rural temple in Samoa through a theoretical framework may help her to filter out her own personal experience from her observations of the group she is studying.

Generalizability

Theoretical frames help to produce generalizable results. This is important because no two religious groups are exactly the same. These groups comprise individuals with unique personal histories and personalities. The members live their lives in very particular relationships with others in their community, so each religious group is different from the other. Continuing with the example of the researcher in rural Samoa, how can the social scientist make claims about global Mormonism or even Mormonism in Samoa if every temple is different? The answer is that it is not easy to do so, but examining groups through a theoretical lens helps to highlight data and analysis that can be used to make these sorts of claims.

Scholarly contribution

By using theoretical frames, the researcher is able to contribute to larger bodies of academic research. If the researcher in Samoa is interested in understanding masculine identities in the Mormon temple she is studying, she will be able to use the results of her research to contribute to other academic work on gender or masculine identity. She will be able to not only contribute to decades of published work on this topic, but also use the work of others to guide her own project. She may have read an interesting article about how some men in northern Idaho construct gendered identities by practicing mixed martial arts. She can use the conclusions from this study in a very different cultural context to help her work on Mormon temples in rural Samoa.

Make no mistake, situating your research into these larger theoretical frameworks is not an easy task; even seasoned researchers can struggle with the process. In fact, this is one of the most difficult aspects of studying religion from a social scientific perspective, but we think it is also one of its most useful aspects. In most introductory Anthropology and Sociology courses, the instructor will tell the class that one of the primary purposes of the discipline is to “make the familiar strange and the strange familiar.” This can be an awkward, discomforting and agonizing process with any subject, but particularly when studying religion.

Once again in Samoa, if the Mormon researcher is using a gender frame to study the temple, she will have to observe and analyze prayers, worship songs, marriage ceremonies and sermons by paying special attention to gender roles and norms. This will likely be a very different experience for her than when she prayed, sang, listened to sermons and attended weddings simply as a practicing Mormon.

How might a journalist and a social scientist approach religion differently?

Qualitative sociology and anthropology are similar to journalism, but there are some key differences. The time a social scientist spends collecting data is usually much longer than a journalist. One of the reasons social scientists are able to spend so much time collecting data is that the research is not tied to the news cycle and the emphasis is on the analysis, not an up-to-date description of the event, place or group of people.

News stories offer some facts or data about a topic, and journalists can bring in greater context through in-depth features. The detailed process of a sociological or anthropological examination can offer insights and understandings of religious groups or phenomena that the journalistic reporting process may not uncover. Journalists, therefore, often seek out the expertise of scholars who have studied a topic extensively.

Additionally, the publications produced by social scientists are directed at other academics, so the structure, vocabulary, writing style and length of the books and articles they write will be much different from those written by journalists, who write for the general public.

How is social science and journalism different?

In this video, journalist Nick Street explores some of the differences between how a social scientist and a journalist go about making sense of their observations and interviews.

What can journalists and social science researchers learn from each other?

As part of a hybrid journalistic-academic project, the Center for Religion and Civic Culture commissioned 80 projects on spiritually engaged humanitarians from journalists, along with two dozen academic case studies. CRCC journalism fellow Ken Chitwood, who also has a PhD in the ethnographic study of religion, produced a report on “Ethnographic Religion Reporting” for ReligionLink based on his work on five profiles and interviews and focus groups with other journalism fellows.

Ethnography has long played a critical role in the study of religion, complementing more textual and historical approaches to religious practice and communities and local forms of religiosity.

Moving away from idealized or ideological representations of “religion,” the ethnographic study of religion offers a nuanced, textured and “messy” snapshot of socio-cultural diversification in religious expression, practice, and material life and ways that actors adapt their beliefs, practices, rituals etc. to specific contexts and circumstances….

With that said, ethnographers have long struggled with communicating their critical findings to the general public. In this regard, they can both learn from — and lean into active collaborations with — religion newswriters, whose raison d’être is communicating to a wide array of audiences.

And this is the point of ethnographic journalism. It is not to make ethnographers out of journalists or journalists out of ethnographers. Instead, it is an invitation for each to learn from the experience of the other in order to improve the methods and aesthetics of their own practice, for the sake of the improved public understanding of religion.

Read the “Ethnographic Religion Reporting” guide 

Taking photography and recording audio and video can be helpful in many different ways. Looking back at your images can help you recall details that you might not have recorded in your notes. Presentations increasingly incorporate audio and visual resources as well. A paper or presentation is made all the more interesting by a great photograph or compelling clip of video.

Before you take a picture or start recording an interview or scene, be sure to ask for permission to do so. In many states, it’s against the law to record a phone call without the permission of the other party. In some instances, it may be necessary to have people sign a waiver if you plan to use the photographs for something other than a class presentation, particularly if their are children or other vulnerable people in your photos. Please consult your school or university about these rules.

If you are visiting a congregation, you may want to ask your point person or a leader about photography before you go to the event. If you cannot do so beforehand, ask an usher or anybody who appears to have some authority. In media-savvy congregations, you may have no problem taking photos without prior permission. In smaller groups, you may be able to ask the whole group or agree to take pictures only of a certain side of the room. In any case, be sure to explain how the images or recordings will be used.

Religious services are difficult places to take photography and video. Many smart phones have adequate cameras, particularly if you are taking photos for your own notes. They are also less conspicuous if you’re uncertain whether you can take photos in that environment. If you hope to use visuals in presentations, you may want to invest in a camera that allows you to shoot manually. You can also take a photography class or find resources online about how to take a good picture. Here are a few tips on getting good visuals at a religious service:

• Get out of your seat. The lighting is often difficult in places of worship. Getting closer to a brightly lit altar or stage will also help you avoid the stark contrast between light and dark areas. Walk down side aisles in order to avoid getting in the way of a service or crouch down at the front. If there’s a balcony, go up there to get a different angle.

• Zoom with your feet. Don’t just rely your camera’s zoom, but move closer to your subject. If you’re using your phone, the digital zoom can be pixelated. Your composition will improve if you get closer your subject.

• Composition: The easiest way to make your pictures look more professional is to think about the rule of thirds. If you think of a grid on a picture split into thirds both horizontally and vertically, our eyes tend to gravitate to the spots where the lines meet. Instead of centering a photo, put your subject to the left or right.

• Take a variety of pictures. Don’t just take pictures of the religious leader at the front; turn the camera around and take pictures of the congregation. Take an establishing shot of the building, a wide shot of the whole room, a medium shot of the choir and close ups of a few individuals.

• Take a lot of pictures. You may be lucky and take one amazing photo, but more often than not, you’ll realize that the photo is out of focus or the lighting or composition is off when you download it to your computer. The more pictures you take, the more likely you’ll have something you like. And the more you practice, the better you become.

The COVID-19 pandemic stopped in-person social science research. At USC, the Office for the Protection of Research Subjects prohibited in-person “community and field-based” research entirely.

It is still possible, however, to research religion from the comfort of your own home. What you learn from virtual research may be different than what you learn from immersing yourself into a space as a participant observer, and it may be more difficult to establish a connection with interview sources, but you can collect interesting, useful data. With all research, check with your University’s Institutional Review Board for approvals on protection of research subjects in your research plans and protocols.

Here are some tips, compiled by CRCC’s researchers and journalist fellows, about how they are getting as much information as they can virtually.

• Conduct interviews over the phone or an online video service like Zoom.
• When using a video call, you are getting a rare peek into their private space. Do not use a virtual background and ask your interviewee not to do so either. Ask people about things you see on the video—perhaps there are significant pictures on the wall behind them or momentos on their desk. What are they looking at that you can’t see through the camera?
• Ask people to describe where they are, what it looks like, what the air is like, what it smells like even. What is outside their window?
• Arrange to conduct multiple interviews. Zoom fatigue is real, and spacing shorter interviews over several days or a few weeks  gives you an opportunity to adapt your questions to what you are learning and for your interviewee to think about what else they would like to share.
• Ask to set up Zoom meetings with your interviewee when they are in different locations (home, office, etc.) to see a different side of your subject.
• One way to “see” interview subjects within their contexts would be to ask them to record a short voice memo describing a particular “scene” or reflecting on an experience immediately after it. For instance, you cannot accompany a chaplain ministering in a hospital on her rounds, but you might be able to understand some of the emotions she feels through a voice memo reflection to you. Your interviewee could also record an in-person conversation with somebody else—a colleague, spouse, child—with the other person’s permission, of course.
• Use “participant observation” by participating in religious services or meetings online. Be sure to ask for consent from the host in advance and be clear about who you are and why you are there with other participants.