Abstract
In Social Research Methods, Joshua Iyadurai, founder and director of Marina Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Religion (MCISR), Chennai, India, provides a guide for qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research for students and scholars in theology and Religious Studies more broadly. His purpose is to provide an overview of the typical process and skills needed for social science-oriented missiological and theological research. As such, Iyadurai introduces his readers chapter-by-chapter to the process of choosing a topic, reviewing the literature, choosing and using the most appropriate qualitative or quantitative methodologies for the study, writing on the research findings, and presenting it to examiners and the scholarly community.
The audience Iyadurai has in mind is the broader theological and missiological scholarly community, though much of his advice is oriented toward graduate students just beginning their research process. Throughout, he distills insights of seminal and recent work on research methods, all the while helping students consider how these can help research theological and ministerial questions and be applied to ministry and mission work.
Because Social Research Methods seeks to give a comprehensive overview of the research and writing process, some scholars of anthropology and other social sciences may find some of Iyadurai’s summaries and explanations to be somewhat brief and simplistic. His overview of approaches in qualitative research (Chapter 4), for example, provides introductory and cursory descriptions of key research designs and methodologies, such as phenomenological, grounded research, ethnographic, and narrative approaches. In such cases scholars and students will want to supplement Iyadurai’s text with others that offer more in-depth discussion of these points.
But Iyadurai’s succinct descriptions can also serve as a helpful overview for the beginning student or the non-specialist in the social sciences. For example, Iyadurai surveys various data-gathering methods and provides a straightforward, introductory explanation of data analysis coding. As well, his final chapters (“Writing a research proposal,” “Writing a research report,” and “The role of supervisors and examiners”) seek to provide students in graduate Missiology and Theology Studies an overview of the thesis and dissertation writing process.
There may be those that feel that the field of Missiology, and of Theology in general, has been in need of an up-to-date guide to the social science research and writing process as it applies to those disciplines. Many will find that Iyadurai’s book provides us with just that and warrants serious consideration.