Social scientists bring their faith into research – And it shows up in their results - LSE Impact Why do studies on whether religion is disappearing totally contradict each other? Valeria Rainero, Jörg Stolz and Ruud Luijkx discuss their recent research on how faith (or lack of it) shaped…

🗣️"The secularization debate is not going away anytime soon. Our study does not prove that one side is objective while the other is biased. But it does suggest that researchers should pay closer attention to the preconceptions they bring to their work."

@valeriarainero.bsky.social #SocialScience

The Contemporary Debate on Secularization and Its Cross‐National Variation: A Systematization Through Topic Modeling Secularization is a key concept in the social scientific study of religion, yet its meaning remains ambiguous due to varied definitions produced in the literature. This article aims to provide a data...

Out now in @jssreligion.bsky.social with @ruudluijkx.bsky.social
Using topic modeling on 1600+ academic articles, we provide a systematization of secularization literature and test whether researchers tend to study their own communities 👇
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Fascinating paper! Scholars who are secular are more likely to believe in secularization & find evidence of it in their research. The opposite pattern is true for scholars who are religious.

This is worth your time to read in full:
sociologicalscience.com/download/vol...

My first paper is out in #SociologicalScience!
With Jörg Stolz and Ruud Luijkx, we found robust evidence of ideological #bias in #secularization research: researchers' own religiosity is correlated with their probability of finding evidence of religious decline in their publications.
Read more: 👇