Getting my research project started

Hello, and welcome!  You have stumbled upon my blog for the Coursera Data Management and Visualization course.  I have chosen to analyze the 2012 Outlook on Life Survey, and specifically to examine the association of religiosity and acceptance of other groups, which I have divided into the racial, political, and cultural.

Once I chose the dataset, I read through its codebook to decide what I would study within it.  The Outlook on Life (OOL) codebook is 421 pages long, and I had to scan through it two or three times to find the data subsets I wanted to compare.  Then my task was to prepare my own codebook for those subsets.  At present, my codebook is still 116 pages.

While religiosity can be internal or external (or perhaps intrinsic and extrinsic -- I am not very familiar with psychological jargon), social status is far less dependent upon perceived religiosity than in the past, so I think the distinction will not be great.  And besides, the dataset does not allow for parsing these types of religiosity, as far as I can tell.  That said, I am considering the possibility that my second topic, acceptance of other groups, may be too broad, and I may need to narrow it down to one of the three subtopics.

Of course, the next step is to study what others have already done in this area.  I found the results to be mixed.  Photiadis and Biggar (1962) found a negative correlation between church participation and "ethnic distance".  Similarly, Verma and Upadhyay (1984) found a negative correlation between high religiosity and "desire for social distance".  Again, Grandin and Brinkerhoff (1991) stated "fundamentalism was not found to be significantly related to racial and ethnic intolerance.... a significant, negative relationship was found between intrinsic religious orientation and social distance."  However, Duriez (2009) concluded "The Literal vs. Symbolic dimension [of religion] was found to significantly contribute to the prediction of racism", and Hall, Matz, and Wood (2009) claimed that in their study, "Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant".

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a molecular biologist (M.S.) and a Christian with high religiosity.  As a biologist, I am taken by the subjective nature of the study of humans' attitudes, and I am aware that my own perceptions and biases will play a part in how I look at the data and the conclusions I draw.  For example, I rather think that *which* religion you belong to will have an effect on desire for social distance.  I'm sure others have studied this.

Looking at the short selection of previous literature, I notice that the earlier papers find more positive correlations between religiosity and acceptance of other groups than do the later papers.  The more recent articles also focus more specifically on "racism", which I contend has broadened its definition over time.  I hypothesize that high religiosity will positively correlate with acceptance of other groups.  I think that whatever I find, my conclusions must be tempered by the knowledge that there are many factors at work.