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Internet-Based Research in the Social Science of Religion William Sims Bainbridge Co-director of Human-Centered Computing at the National Science Foundation (NSF) ARDA GUIDING PAPER Internet-Based Research in the Social Science of Religion For a decade, social scientists have been aware that much religion-oriented communication takes place on Internet (Hadden and Cowan 2000). During that time, the amount of activity online has increased greatly, and the forms of Internet usage have diversified seemingly without end. It is also true that scientists have discovered new ways to extract data from websites or other Internet-based systems, even when they are not explicitly religious, that can benefit researchers interested in religion. No longer is the task merely studying the innovative ways people can use Internet for religious purposes. It is now also possible to use Internet-derived data to develop and test general theories of religious behavior that apply offline as well as online. This paper will describe Internet-based research methods that are cutting-edge, meet reasonable tests of validity and reliability, and are sufficiently practical that students can use them for graduate papers and dissertations at the same time that their professors are preparing professional publications based on them. The emphasis will be on quantitative methods, but some qualitative methods will also be mentioned, in part to place the quantitative techniques in a wider methodological context, as well as to identify directions in which innovations might be developed. At the outset, we can identify seven general principles: 1. Internet based research can employ traditional techniques of social-science research, and can adapt those methods in fresh ways. 2. Entirely new valid methodological approaches can also be developed, sometimes with only the most tenuous or metaphoric relations to earlier methods. 3. To maximize both innovativeness and efficiency, collaborations between social scientists and computer scientists are often necessary. 4. Even when working collaboratively with computer scientists, a social scientist needs to develop a significant expertise managing Internet data, including even some programming knowledge, but this is actually not difficult to achieve. 5. Working with existing data collected from Internet, or with new data collected by an innovative online system, will require the social scientist to pay more attention to issues of data management than is common in more traditional contexts. 6. The best results will come from studies that carefully but aggressively address methodological and theoretical issues together, realizing that the most important challenges and opportunities require deep thinking about both, and that insights from one can inform the other. 7. Internet-related technologies and their social applications are in constant flux, so researchers should be looking for new possibilities, and the examples offered here are meant to inspire rather than constrain scientific creativity. Collaborations between social scientists and computer or information scientists will require both sides to gain appreciation of the other's point of view. Social scientists in particular will need to realize that many of COPYRIGHT ASSOCIATION OF RELIGION DATA ARCHIVES | 1 of 42 ARDA GUIDING PAPER Internet-Based Research in the Social Science of Religion the very best computer scientists conceptualize science very differently, particularly without the same kind of dedication to theory and zeal in comparing competing theoretical positions that social scientists love. One example will suffice, an excellent recent computer science article about religion and information technology, "Re-Placing Faith: Reconsidering the Secular-Religious Use Divide in the United States and Kenya" by Susan P. Wyche, Paul M. Aoki, and Rebecca E. Grinter. Before we even consider the topic, it is important to note that this is a conference paper, given at CHI 2008 in Florence, Italy. Conferences play an almost totally different role in computer science from the role they play in social science, and CHI is the most prestigious and influential scientific gathering on the relationships between human beings and information technology. It is the annual conference of SIGCHI, the special interest group on human factors in computing of the Association of Computing Machinery. Giving a paper at CHI is like getting one published in Social Forces for a sociologist, but the publication is immediate, rather than waiting a year or two as with social science paper journals. A social scientist who wants to collaborate with computer scientists will need to adapt to the rough and rapid, but still seriously reviewed, publication system in computer science. Another characteristic of this article that requires some adjustment on the part of social scientists is that it seems to have a very practical focus, rather than being motivated by the desire to test abstract theory. Noting the continuing and perhaps increasing significance of religion, and the possibility that secular populations make greater use of information technology, the researchers have carried out a series of studies to understand how information technologies could be better designed to serve the distinctive needs of highly religious people, indeed to serve some of their religious needs (Wyche et al. 2006, 2009a, 2009b). For example, in this study the researchers discovered that religious people often want to remember points that were made in an especially inspirational Sunday church sermon, and so they developed a note taking system using mobile phone technology to help them accomplish this in a versatile, convenient, and cost effective manner. A third characteristic of the study is that the investment in varied aspects of the methodology has a very different balance from what we would expect to see in a professional social scientific study. The research team collected data in Atlanta, Georgia, and Nairobi, Kenya, at great effort, but did so through somewhat unstructured interviews and ethnographic observation with small numbers of individuals. This is standard in the field of human-computer interaction research. The goal is to understand in depth what can be learned from people who COPYRIGHT ASSOCIATION OF RELIGION DATA ARCHIVES | 2 of 42 ARDA GUIDING PAPER Internet-Based Research in the Social Science of Religion act as key native informants and who invest much of their own effort in the study, but without any concern over what fraction of the general population these people represent. Their function is to inspire innovation among the computer scientists, who design new technology through a sort of collaboration with their research subjects. In the case of this fine study, the result is a contribution not only to knowledge, but even more importantly to the existing store of design ideas from which technologists may draw, and a contribution to the people of faith who will use future information technology designed to serve religious purposes. For computer scientists, theory tends to mean one of two things. First of all, it refers to mathematical theory typically concerning methods of calculating algorithms. The criterion of good theory by this definition is that it guides calculations that are both swift and accurate. Second, theory in the human-centered computing area really refers to design principles to guide the creation of new technologies to serve specified human needs. In this case, the computer scientists draw intelligently upon some social science of religion concepts, and they accomplish good ethnography of Kenyan religious and community culture, but in the service of future technologies to benefit religious people, rather than to frame abstract theories about religion. One more feature of this study deserves mention as background for the present paper, namely that it studies information technology broader than the term "Internet" would cover. The people in Atlanta used Internet, but those in Nairobi used cell phones and text messaging using those phones. Technically, Internet refers to a data communication network that uses the TCP/IP protocol, but much of what you can access through Internet is not really native to it and may originally use other technologies. The World Wide Web is a subset of the billions of files reachable over Internet, those formatted with the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and within the Web there are many files belonging to the Deep Web that cannot be accessed by search engines because they are behind password protection or other barriers. Just as the Web is a subset of Internet, Internet is a subset of The Net, which comprises all forms of electronic communication. Already barriers are breaking down between traditional electronic media, and the distinctions between radio and podcasts, television and YouTube, telephone and Skype are historical anachronisms. Thus, while this paper will emphasize data that can indeed be accessed over the current Internet, the reader should be alert to the fact that realities and definitions are changing rapidly, and all modes of electronic communication are currently converging. Here we shall emphasize the usual social-scientific concerns with theory and methods, more than technological results, but remain mindful of the somewhat different priorities of the computer scientists who COPYRIGHT ASSOCIATION OF RELIGION DATA ARCHIVES | 3 of 42 ARDA GUIDING PAPER Internet-Based Research in the Social Science of Religion provide us with the needed technologies.

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