Measuring the Muse: Reflections on the Use of Survey Methods in the Study of Religious Phenomena

Abstract

Foundational problems inherent in the collection, analysis and interpretation of interview and questionnaire data used in the social scientific study of human religious experience are discussed. These foundational problems include: the ambiguity of linguistic symbols, the relation of the causal past to the emerging present, the relation of a whole to its constituent parts, the role of creative minorities in human societies, and the use of a method of difference in data analysis and interpretation. These problematic issues are interpreted from the point of view of process philosophy. An appeal is made to common sense to act as a restraint on specialists who circumscribe too narrowly their grounds for model building and/or overanalyze inherently vague linguistic data. Interpretations of survey research data denying the authenticity of religious experience or ignoring a consideration of the question by appealing implicity or explicitly to a factvalue disjunction in human experience are challenged.