Common Topics of Sociology of Religion in Non-Religion-Specific Journal Articles

Abstract

In this study, I analyze the main topics and results introduced in recent publications in the sociology of religion. Briefly touching upon the practical use of identification of major topics covered in published literature during the process of publication output planning, we continue the article with the thematical analysis of those journal articles in the sociology of religion, in which the presented research did not focus on a specific religion or on the believers of a specific religion. We examined the adherence to this criterion of lack of specification in 173 articles published in leading international journals between 2010 and 2013, from the journal list of the Institute of Sociology of the HAS (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), from which 66 journal articles were coded and classified with inductive categorization consistent with grounded theory. Throughout the process, we managed to identify 6 main topics (Secularization, Economy, Sexuality, Politics, Personal Satisfaction, and Well-Being, Social CoExistence, and Cooperation). We then further divided each of these key themes into subtopics, and we examined the studies further, according to the institutional affiliation of first author(s), institutional affiliation of journal editors, and geographic location of journal publishers. Results show that the identified topics and topic preferences are characteristics of a subset of a Western sociological knowledge, produced mainly by agents embedded in an Anglo-Saxon research environment.