Religious Diversity and Vitality, Article Critique Example

A 2013 study by Krech and colleagues examines the relationship between diversification of religion and religious vitality. The researchers present their design as a solution to criticisms that have undermined virtually all previous studies on the topic, the harshest of which identified a confounding tautological relationship between independent and dependent variables based on the common reference to organizational membership counts (Voas, Olson, and Crockett 212). This issue is avoided by the use of organizational variation within populations as an indicator of religious diversity and the concept of centrality as a measure of religious vitality. It is hypothesized that vitality and diversity of religion are related variables, and the authors claim to confirm their theory by demonstrating the correlation of religious affiliation in terms of being a part of a majority, minority, or non-religious group, with the established dependent measure.

Supporting information is adequately supplied, the methodology is thorough, and the design directly addresses known shortcomings, but there remains to be a serious error in this study. The authors claimed to confirm their hypothesis, which is not true. The experiment they designed did not result in a significant finding in relation to the stated hypothesis. The inclusion of a variety of control variables demonstrated an unpredicted effect of sub-groups that was further examined in a post-hoc analysis, and should not have been presented as a confirmation of the research hypothesis.

Works Cited

Krech, Volkhard, Markus Hero, Stefan Huber, Kimmo Ketola, and Richard Traunmuller. “Religious Diversity and Religious Vitality.” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 9.3 (2013).

Voas, David, Daniel Olson, and Alasdair Crockett. “Religious Pluralism and Participation: Why Previous Research Is Wrong.” American Sociological Review 67: 212–230.