The YARG mixed-method approach

In this section, we present the YARG project, concentrating on who took part in the project, the aims of the project, the methods used, and some aspects of special interest for the study of media and religion.

Youth and digital religion 31

YARG was an Âbo Akademi University Center of Excellence in Research between the years 2015-2018 and further funded by the Academy of Finland between the years 2015-2019. The project was led by prof. Peter Nynâs and directed by a core team of researchers based at the Department of the Study of Religions at Abo Akademi University in Turku, Finland. Thirteen national contexts were included: Canada, China, Ghana, Finland, India, Israel, Japan, Peru, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, and the United States. In each national context, the project had local investigators, usually scholars connected to the universities where the data was gathered. The local investigators helped in planning the project, choosing research assistants, conducting fieldwork, and have also been key to analyzing the data and presenting the results. The project also aimed to encourage coauthorship and to support the careers of young researchers. Consequently, the chapters in this volume are the result of collaborative work between both local investigators and research assistants and members of the core team in Finland (for more on YARG see Klingenberg and Sjb 2019; Nynâs et al. forthcoming).

The YARG project focused on three main research questions:

• What are the characteristics of the religious subjectivities and values among young adults globally in terms of configurations of religious, spiritual, and secular assumptions regarding beliefs, attitudes, practices, and experiences?
• What are the main discourses that constitute and shape those subjectivities in terms of institutional, social, cultural, and other related influences?
• What methodological and theoretical implications follow from our results with regard to the conceptualization of contemporary religion?

Particularly in relation to the second question, the topic of media was identified as a main source of interest and was consequently given a fair amount of attention in the research design.

To explore the chosen research questions, a mixed-method approach was adopted. The project combined the following instruments and methods: a general survey containing the Portrait Value Questionnaire (PVQ), the Faith Q-Sort (FQS), and semi-structured thematic interviews. With the exception of Japan, where only the survey was conducted, all instruments were applied in all the other studied contexts. The Inglehart-Welzel “Cultural Map of the World” (www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp) provided the mac-rotheoretical justification for the choice of countries included. The studied contexts were also chosen in order to achieve as broad a variety as possible in terms of religious contexts. In all contexts, the project focused on young adult university students between the ages 18-30. However, due to differences in the ages at which people attend university in the different studied contexts, we find some variations regarding age in the data. Particularly in the samples from Canada and Sweden, some students older than 30 also tookpart in the study. The choice of focusing on university students (a convenience sample) was largely motivated by reasons related to feasibility and access to participants on an international, cross-cultural scale. However, young adult university students also make up the generation whose religiosity and religious outlooks are particularly prone to influences from media, consumer culture, social movements, and changing values (e.g. Arnett and Jensen 2002; Collins-Mayo and Beaudoin 2010; Bobkowski 2014). Our international partners and assistants were asked to seriously consider issues regarding sampling and choose groups of respondents carefully and with regard to the diversity of young people in all studied contexts.

The survey

The survey was distributed to approximately 300 students in all studied contexts. A total of 4,964 individuals took part in the survey. The survey included six item blocs (A-F), along with the PVQ (discussed in the next section). As with all instruments used in YARG, the survey was translated into twelve different languages using a double forward and back translation process. The item blocs of the survey dealt with the following topics:

A) participants’ current life situation;
B) social life;
C) sources for news and information;
D) views and convictions;
E) well-being and happiness;
F) personal details.

In developing the questions, previous national and international survey questions were used to allow for comparisons. The parts of the survey that are of particular interest for the present volume relate both to item bloc B, which included questions regarding social life, and to item bloc C, which included questions on media use and sources for news and information. Item bloc B included several items focusing on the religiosity of the participants. Participants were asked about their religious belonging, self-assessed degrees of personal religiosity, self-assessed degrees of religiosity of the parental family, and frequency of engagement in both public and private religious practice. Item bloc C asked participants about their use and frequency of use of different types of media, Internet use, sources for news and information about current affairs, and whom/where one turns to for guidance when making important decisions in life (see the Appendix). We will return to these questions shortly and present an overview of the survey findings regarding both religion and media use and the correlations between these.