Project Activities

Each phase builds upon the previous, creating a comprehensive framework for understanding contemporary religious movements and their impact on human flourishing.

Detailed Project Activities

Phase 1: Poll Creation

The core team members, in consultation with advisory board members and outside scholars, will create the “New Religiosities Poll” (NRP) for the Database of Religious History at the University of British Columbia. We will host two NRP workshops in Year One in order to discuss how to operationalize key variables that will be assessed at the group- or movement-level. We will create poll questions generic enough to encompass cross-regional religious diversities and specific enough to test hypotheses and explore new variable correlations. To avoid data bias through jargon or leading questions, we will discuss epistemic frameworks and language use to strive towards neutrality across all entries. The final form of the NRP will have about 900 quantitative options and a typical entry will have around 350 completed answers. Most questions will be answered by three potential responses: 1) yes/no/field doesn’t know/I don’t know; 2) selecting from a checklist of possible responses; and 3) giving a numerical response. These questions allow for data to be formatted for machine-readability and analyzed through quantitative methods. There will also be space for qualitative elaborations and links to external discursive sources.

Phase 2: Data Collection

Inform staff, under the supervision of Director Newcombe (co-PI) and Senior Research Officer Harvey, will input 200 entries to the New Religiosity Poll (NRP). The other 200 entries will be collected by scholars and citizen scientists in South, East, and Southeast Asia, led by Dr. Christopher (co-PI). The NRP will follow the model of the DRH’s existing Religious Group Poll that relies on the expertise of typically a trained historian, sociologist, anthropologist, or religious studies scholar to complete a specific entry. We will also utilize a citizen science paradigm to train people within groups to complete entries. In most cases, experts will already have the requisite knowledge to complete the NRP poll; however, in some instances, they may complete small-scale archival or follow-up ethnographic fieldwork to gather targeted data, as needed.

Phase 3: Analytics

After collecting data on 400 entries, we will provisionally map out inter-relationships between variables relating to beliefs and behaviors through lineage and clustering analysis of specific social categories. These categories include minoritization, millenarianism, gender, environmental beliefs, epistemic authority and value orientations. These provisional analyses will lead to several publications, including a data descriptor to facilitate other researchers to utilize the data set for their own research questions.

Project Timeline