Quantitative-Bibliometric Study on Religiosity in the Last 25 Years of Social Science Research

Abstract

Using a quantitative–bibliometric methodology, this study attempted to locate from which perspectives the study of religiosity is being approached in the scientific world, in order to achieve traceability for recent research using the following keywords—religiosity, gender, age, ethnicity and social life—locating possible future directions as well as fields of study yet to be discovered, and studying the evolution of scientific research on religiosity in the social sciences in the last 25 years. According to the results obtained in the Scopus database from the literature on concepts such as family, culture, spirituality, identity, marriage and sexuality, we discovered that the research revolved around six main components: education, mental health, attitudes, psychological aspects, religion and gender.

1. Introduction

Any scientific approach to lived religiosity should strive for the greatest possible objectivity, providing reliable data that can be contrasted and refuted by other researchers.

The present study investigated the evolution of social scientific research on religiosity in the last 25 years through a quantitative–bibliometric methodology using the keywords: religiosity, gender, age, ethnicity and social life. The aim was to locate from which perspectives religiosity has been approached lately in the social scientific world, providing an overall view that makes it possible to locate which concepts are being linked to religiosity. We intend to provide data that is as objective as possible on the research in the social sciences about this religious phenomenon.

By locating the topics in the field of religiosity in which scientists have been interested, we offer a panoramic view of the perspective from which the concept of religiosity is being addressed. This allows for the tracing of recent research, locating possible future orientations as well as fields of study yet to be discovered.

Before attempting to define the concept of religiosity, due to the subjective dimension from which we generally speak of religion today, it is necessary to mention the fact that the concept of religiosity is necessarily conditioned by the view of religion from which one starts, either by cultural substratum or by vital convictions. Depending on the position of the observer, more importance will be given to sociological, cultural, anthropological, psychological, ethnological, folkloric or religious aspects (O’Donnell and Pié-Ninot 2001, p. 930).

The word “religiosidad” appeared in the Spanish language at the end of the 17th century (Corominas 1994, p. 501). According to the Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española 2019), the term “religiosidad” (from the Latin “religiosĭtas”, “-ātis”) has three meanings: (1) the quality of being religious; (2) a practice and dedication in fulfilling religious obligations; and (3) punctuality, accuracy in doing, observing or fulfilling something. The second one, due to its meaning in terms of religious action, is the most appropriate for the context of this research.

As the research was carried out through the Scopus database due to its research power, it is necessary to point out that, being in English, a terminological distinction is necessary. In the English lexicon, there are two synonymous words for religiosity: “religiosity” and “religiousness” (Cambridge Dictionary 2022). “Religiousness” is an adjective meaning that which exhibits religion, is pious or devout, referring to the personal and internal dimension, while “religiosity” means religious feelings or devotion, and its first known usage was in 1799 (Merriam-Webster 2022). Therefore, the term “religiosity” belongs more to the social, public and external spheres; it was chosen for this research as it is more empirical and, therefore, more appropriate.

The term “religiosity” is broader than the term “religion”; it refers to religious practice of any kind. For example, religiosity may refer to liturgical rituals, patronal feasts, pilgrimages, vows, blessings, devotions to saints, devotions to the Virgin Mary, traditional feasts of thanksgiving and many forms of folklore linked, directly or indirectly, to religion. Usually, the term is associated with the adjective “popular” due to the contemporary and growing interest in the study of the religiosity of the people; through the study, researchers are trying to find the soul and the background orientation of the present culture, fleeing from preconceived frameworks that may condition it (Sartore et al. 1987, p. 1722). In some places, popular religiosity is a secular manifestation that does not tolerate the interference of clerics (O’Donnell and Pié-Ninot 2001, p. 931) nor of civil powers.

The growing interest in religiosity, even attending the simplest popular custom, has been led by the human sciences more than by theology, since the crisis of dominant values in the past has led researchers to go back and ask themselves about humanity and its complete reality. The same concept of culture, from a view extended to all strata of the population, has attracted attention to folklore animated by the deep interest in knowing the ethnocultural roots, becoming an important and fundamental element of culture (Sartore et al. 1987, p. 1724).

In fact, many different aspects of religiosity are being studied: the role it can play in gender development from childhood (de Vries et al. 2022, p. 21), its relationship with ethnicity and gender identification (Chin et al. 2021, p. 2816), its effect with respect to age (Shulgin et al. 2019, p. 591) and health (Zullig et al. 2006, p. 255) and as a predictor of ethical awareness in social relations (Conroy and Emerson 2004, p. 383). There have even been attempts to develop instruments for its measurement (Iddagoda and Opatha 2016, p. 9). It has been demonstrated that religiosity has a positive and significant effect on citizenship behavior (Dami et al. 2020, p. 231). Levels of religious affiliation and private religious devotion tend to increase throughout life, with women obtaining a higher level of religiosity than men (Bergan and McConatha 2001, p. 33).

It is, therefore, necessary to have a panoramic view of the scientific studies carried out in order to understand where the scientific interest in religiosity is heading.

2. Materials and Methods

Methods

A quantitative–bibliometric methodology was used to retrieve a total of 1500 scientific documents from the Scopus database in the field of social sciences to form our study sample.

The search procedure in the database was performed by selecting article title, abstract and keywords. From this point, using the Boolean operators “and” and “or”, the following search sequence was used: religiosity AND (gender or age or ethnicity or social life). The search was then refined to the timeframe of the last 25 years, i.e., the period from 1997 to 2021. Finally, we filtered the search by type of document, looking only for empirical research, so that the sample of 1500 documents corresponded exclusively to scientific articles from journals indexed in databases such as JCR or SJR.

For the analysis of the data, we used as variables the sources of information, authors, countries and the scientific articles’ two types of keywords, namely, the author’s keywords and the keywords plus. The Biblioshiny interface of RStudio v.4.0.4 (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017, p. 959) was used for the construction and visualization of the graphs, networks and thematic maps.

3. Results

From the sample of 1500 documents, we present in

Table 1. Main information of the sample.

Description	Results
Temporal Space	1997–2021
Documents (articles)	1500
Sources (journals)	691
Author’s keywords	3473
Keywords plus	1754
Authors	3518
Collaboration Index	2.97
Origin country	No of articles
USA	586
Israel	86
United Kingdom	66
Germany	37
Canada	32
Netherlands	31
Australia	30
Italy	16
Brazil, Malaysia, Norway, Turkey	15
India	14
Spain	13
Croatia, France	11
Finland	10
Poland, Portugal	9
Austria, Belgium, Greece, Iran, Sweden	8
Hungary, Indonesia, South Africa	7
Hong Kong, Ireland, Korea, Mexico, Slovakia, Switzerland	6
Denmark, Georgia, Romania	5
China, Czech Republic, Egypt, Nigeria, Thailand	4
Ghana, Japan, Saudi Arabia	3
Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Colombia, Estonia, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lithuania, Philippines	2
Barbados, Belarus, Bolivia, Brunei, Chile, Dominica, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lebanon, New Zealand, Pakistan, Qatar, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, Trinidad and Tobago, Zimbabwe	1

the number of keywords retrieved, including both types, as well as data related to the sources and authors as the main variables to be investigated. In addition, the country of origin of the articles is included, although it must be taken into account that, as there are collaborations between countries/authors, there may be articles that share origin or that some countries have greater relevance in a given article than another country.

Figure 1 shows the evolution of the topic studied over time. It can be seen that the evolution has been one of growth in terms of the production of scientific articles on religiosity and the different aspects of social life considered, with an annual growth rate of 8.89%.

The first stage of some stability in the production of scientific papers can be seen from 1997 to 2007. From this point, a new period begins where growth is more evident, with a higher production of articles between 2008 and 2017, despite the peaks presented in the graph during this period. Finally, during a third stage from 2018 to 2021, the production of articles shows more exponential growth, exceeding one hundred scientific papers, with 2021 being the most productive year, with a total of 162 articles around the theme of religiosity and aspects of social life.

Once the annual production was analyzed, the distribution of authors was identified according to their productivity, highlighting the percentage of the most prolific ones. Next, the same was undertaken with the most relevant journals according to the number of articles published.

Firstly, for the topic studied, the inverse quadratic law of Lotka (Lotka 1926, p. 317) was confirmed, where, during a considerable period of 25 years, most authors produced a very small number of articles, while a few authors published a larger number of scientific articles. In numerical terms, the distribution is as presented in

Table 2. Distribution of authors according to number of written papers.

Written Papers	No of Authors
1	3224
2	216
3	54
4	15
5	4
6	2
7	2
12	1

below.

In view of these data, we found a large producer with at least ten or more published works related to the subject of religiosity and aspects of social life. Specifically, this was Francis, LJ with 12 papers produced. The authors with a production of between two and nine articles would be considered medium producers on the topic under investigation. Finally, the bulk of the authors (3224) produced only one document, so that their incursion into the subject of religiosity would have been occasional.

Another aspect to take into account beyond the total production would be its distribution over time. In this way, we can observe whether the authors with a greater number of published works produced them at a given time and, therefore, in a shorter period of time, or whether it was a line of research in which they may be more specialized and they, therefore, research and publish findings relevant to the scientific community on a regular basis. Thus, we present in Figure 2 the production of the most prolific authors over time, and Francis, LJ again is the main author to be highlighted for his production from 2001 to 2020, i.e., covering 20 of the 25 years of the time period studied in our sample. In the graph, we find bubbles of different sizes, with the largest ones corresponding to three published articles, the intermediate ones to two articles and the smallest ones to one article.

As for the academic journals in which the 1500 articles in the sample were published, they revealed important information regarding the most studied themes, trends and problems on the topic of religiosity within the field of social sciences according to the editorial line of each of the publications. However, and in spite of the great similarities that were found, a distinction was made between the journals with the greatest number of articles published and those that experienced the greatest growth during the last 25 years. Thus, it can be seen in Figure 3 that the most relevant journal with up to 28 published articles was the Journal of Homosexuality, followed by Sex Roles with 23 articles, Social Science and Medicine with 21 articles and the Journal of Sex Research with 20 articles. In the same way, continuing with this focus on interest by the scientific community to investigate current issues that relate religiosity with certain components of sexual research that affect social, cultural and political life, the journals with the highest annual growth (Figure 4) shared the same editorial line, highlighting the publications Sexuality Research and Social Policy, Sexuality and Culture and the Journal of Homosexuality.

Next, the conceptual structure of religiosity and its relationship with social aspects such as gender, age, ethnicity and social life were analyzed. For this purpose, a factorial approach was used as a resource for analysis with the author’s keywords and the keywords plus, although independently. The reason for this distinction is the view that each of the keyword types can offer us according to the overview of the topic of religiosity. The two types of keywords are intended to provide synthesized and precise information on the topics of the articles; however, the author’s keywords are freely chosen by the authors themselves or by using different thesauri and, therefore, offer us a more specific view of the phenomenon under investigation. On the other hand, the keywords plus are generated automatically by the databases from the titles of the documents cited with a frequency of appearance of at least two times in the bibliography, thus being a more standardized method of retrieval of terms and phrases, providing a more general and broader view of the phenomenon.

With the factorial approach using the multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) method for the two classes of keywords, the aim is to reduce the data to latent factors and to represent them in a space of lower dimensionality.

Both maps show the formation of three large clusters differentiated by the colors blue, red and green. It should be borne in mind that the locations of the clusters on the map correspond to whether their positions are closer to or further away from the origins of the abscissa and ordinate axes, since their locations give us information about the average position of all the column profiles and, therefore, represent the most important and commonly shared themes and trends within the field of study investigated.

In addition, it can be seen in Figure 5 that the dimension with the highest explained variance is dimension 1 with 38.15%, while dimension 2 averages 25.19%. Following the same pattern, in Figure 6, it is dimension 1 that clearly has the highest explained variance with 80.57%, while the percentage of variance for dimension 2 amounts to 15.84%. Observing the different clusters and their locations on the plane according to the dimensions, in Figure 5 corresponding to the author’s keywords, we find for the blue cluster that the main component is education and around it are related aspects of a very diverse nature, such as family, culture, gender, identity or marriage, where the religious load and its beliefs generate a large presence. Regarding the red cluster, the main component is mental health and all of the research related to this issue and, in this case, its relationship with issues such as depression, spirituality, religiosity and sexual orientation, with special attention to the most intimate and personal psychological elements of the person. Finally, for the green conglomerate, the component related to attitudes and their relationship with certain sexual orientations is the main axis on which the research has focused attention; in this case, it is homosexuality or the different forms of rejection towards this group; that is, homophobia.

Regarding Figure 6, which corresponds to the keywords plus, the main component in the blue conglomerate is psychological aspect, referring especially to adolescents and young people. In the case of the red cluster, it is quite specific and precise with respect to the term “religion” and focuses the studies around this topic on single, well-differentiated aspects such as gender (male and female), but with special attention to the adult population and also to the elderly. It should also be noted that the main and most important publications in this regard are in the United States. Finally, in the green conglomerate, studies and social experiments of a psychological nature and with gender differentiation stand out.

At this point, beyond establishing and identifying the main themes and focuses of attention, we went on to deepen the analysis of the keywords found in each of the clusters of both maps, but classified the terms according to their proximity, i.e., the closest relationships between keywords. The greater or lesser proximity between terms (shared communality) relates to the percentage of articles that include them jointly, depending on whether the number of articles that include them is also greater or lesser. To carry out this classification, two dendrograms were designed (Figure 7 and Figure 8), one for each class of keywords, always respecting the same terms that appear in each of the clusters.

With these results, we inferred more information about the main focuses of interest and thematic trends. From Figure 7 and specifically from the green cluster, due to the scarcity of the keywords that comprise it, no more relevant data than those obtained in the corresponding conceptual structure map can be seen. From the blue cluster, it can be seen that, among its keywords, the term “sexual orientation” would be more distant from the rest of the terms that focus their attention on research into the relationship between mental health and disorders such as depression, and the role that religious and spiritual aspects or beliefs may play at certain times. With respect to the third red cluster, we can identify subgroups and/or pairs of keywords such as the one formed by the terms education, religion and sexuality. Given the nature of these words, it is clear that there is a growing tendency in the scientific community to study aspects of sexual education and the influence of religion or lack thereof on certain practices, beliefs or attitudes. There are also lines of research focused on race and gender (gender–race pair), ethnicity and gender differences (ethnicity–gender differences pair) or everything related to family aspects with a strong religious presence, such as marriage between people of different religious beliefs and their own identity (subgroup formed by the terms secularization, identity, Islam and marriage).

Finally, from Figure 8 corresponding to the keywords plus, something similar to what is demonstrated on the previous dendrogram occurs. From the green and red clusters, no specific problems or new trends in research can be inferred, other than those already detected. However, from the blue cluster, perhaps the most relevant is the psychology–religion pair. There are numerous studies that investigate the relationship between psychological aspects of people who also have religious convictions, in particular by specialized psychology journals that deal with religion. In addition, it has been shown that research is aimed at populations of all ages, from adolescents, through adults, to the elderly.

4. Discussion

The growth of research in this field is evident (Figure 1) and the annual production of scientific articles on religiosity continues to grow visibly, so we understand that studies on this subject will tend to increase in the coming years.

A search for the origins of this word led us to discover that the appearance of the term “religiosidad”, both in Spanish and in English, coincided with the end of the religious wars in Europe, when the Pope lost his temporal power over the kings and princes of Europe who governed the nation-states. The Protestant Reformation, initiated in the 16th century by Martin Luther, led to a schism in the Catholic Church, giving rise to different churches and religious currents called Protestantism.

In addition, popular religiosity, although not entirely absent from Protestantism, is more commonly manifested in the Orthodox and Catholic churches (O’Donnell and Pié-Ninot 2001, p. 933).

The English term “religiosity” may have a negative connotation, implying an empty, formal piety without inner inspiration. It implies a showy and ostentatious (pharisaical) piety, although sometimes it erroneously appears in some writings as a synonym of “religious”. This negative connotation could be caused by a conceptual separation between faith and works, common in a Protestant view of religion, closer in origin to the Anglo-Saxon world, since the Catholic faith necessarily interrelates faith and works as a condition of eschatological salvation.

In any case, avoiding doctrinal controversies, we can state that both dimensions, the internal and the external, are inherent to the religious human being, and knowing this, it is possible to investigate the internal dimension from other branches of scientific knowledge such as, for example, the field of psychology. However, for its investigation, it is easier to attend to the external signs of religious manifestations. In fact, one study evaluated these two dimensions of religiosity, religious affiliation and private religious devotion, and the results indicated that religious affiliation is more strongly linked to life satisfaction than to private religious devotion, finding that both measures of religiosity increased with age (Bergan and McConatha 2001, p. 23).

In the present research, it has been possible to verify that the topic of religiosity and its relationship with elements of social life such as age, ethnicity or gender could be considered as a growing research front in view of its evolution and growth during the last 25 years. Beyond the analysis of scientific production, we have considered the most productive authors and those who could be considered specialists in the field, given their regularity and incursion into this line of research over time. However, as usually happens in “hot” or growing topics and fronts, and in other more consolidated and mature disciplines, we do not find a large number of authors as major producers or many established authors in this line of research on religiosity and aspects of social life.

It should be pointed out that the quantity of research is not necessarily, in itself, accompanied by higher quality, but even being aware of this detail and not wanting to establish ourselves as judges of the quality of other people’s research, the choice of the sample through a relevant database is, in itself, an added guarantee of that quality because Scopus is the largest database of abstracts and citations of peer-reviewed literature—scientific journals, books and conference proceedings—offering a global view of the world’s research output in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities, representing almost 80% of international peer-reviewed publications (Scopus 2022).

The peer-review system established by the journals, together with their objective to offer quality in their publications, can be considered a sufficiently reliable filter to consider all of them as high quality.

In reference to the sources of information, which, in this case, have been entirely scientific journals, the titles of these allow us to infer or approximate the editorial lines governing the works that will later be published. From this introduction, by reviewing the most relevant journals by number of total articles published and growth over time, it has been possible to observe that sexual research is the strongest trend line and that it attracts more attention from the scientific community than other topics also of great interest, such as spirituality, religious beliefs, culture, family or values. These thematic trends inferred from the titles of the journals were subsequently corroborated by analyzing the conceptual structure of religiosity based on the different types of keywords found in the articles and databases.

The relevance of the term religiosity in sexual research, especially in journals of the so-called gender studies, manifests a striking linkage. There are competing concepts, such as gender ideology or sexual and reproductive rights. These intellectual debates, intimately linked to the fields of politics and power struggles, should not cause us to lose sight of the object and objective of our research. Moreover, what is required is a redoubled effort not to be carried away by the prevailing winds of illegitimate interests within an authentic scientific study that should be more concerned with the knowledge of the truth than with the sale of expected results.

Gender ideology is a Christian concept also promulgated in the political sphere and in civil society by Catholic and Evangelical actors who reject the adoption of the gender category in public policies; it was developed by Catholic intellectuals in the 1990s as a reaction to the inclusion of the gender category in the documents of the United Nations Social Conferences (Das Dores Campos Machado 2018, p. 1).

Sexual and reproductive rights are related to the freedom of people to decide their own sexuality and the free exercise of it, being linked to abortion as a right, under the definition of obstetric violence.

“Reproductive rights encompass certain human rights that are already recognized in national laws, international human rights documents and other consensus documents. These rights are based on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, as well as the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. It also includes the right to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion or violence, in accordance with human rights documents”.

(ONU 1995, p. 37)

We reiterate our neutrality in this regard, as it is a politically stormy subject and not very useful for the research that concerns us. However, it is essential to mention this conflict since it could be an important element to be studied in future research, as it could be relevant to the number of research studies on the subject, as well as the number of journals that have been recently created.

The rejection of the gender category by organized religions could encourage the rise of the study of religiosity in this regard as a justification of the new concepts of gender from the religious point of view, or even as an element of attack on organized religions in search of a more centralized approach to religious morality from the political power.

Although it could be an element of judgment to be taken into account, we consider that it would be too simplistic an explanation as the only cause; it should be the object of more profound studies, and not only from the field of social sciences. In any case, this point of view could be useful to the general research on religiosity; moreover, it should be used for further deepening, since as a result of these power struggles, it would facilitate publication on these issues.

In our research, the analysis of the conceptual structure was carried out on the basis of a factorial approach and cluster analysis by classifying the keywords into dendrograms with which to observe and analyze the proximity between terms and, therefore, the main focuses of interest of the research. In this regard, six main components were identified among the planes corresponding to Figure 5 and Figure 6: education, mental health, attitudes, psychological aspects, religion and gender. Around them, the rest of the topics, issues and trends such as family, culture, spirituality, identity, marriage, sexuality, among others, would be developed. Next, in relation to the dendrograms in Figure 7 and Figure 8, specific problems can be seen that revolve around the relationship between religiosity and mental health, sexual education and religion, race and gender, ethnicities and gender differences, family aspects or psychological aspects and religion.

Concepts of mental health depend very much on the cultural concept of health; for example, in the search for other cultural points of view, a recent study among healers of indigenous ethnic groups in southern Ecuador explored the concepts of health and illness in other cultures, and through the analysis of the data, a definition of health and illness was elaborated. The indigenous perspective of health and illness focuses on a balance between four bodies: physical, spiritual, social and mental. In addition, “good health” is obtained through good nutrition and balance/harmony. Indigenous healers in southern Ecuador have views on health and illness that differ from the Western biomedical model of care. These different views must be recognized and valued in order to build an intercultural health system that enhances both ancestral and modern medical knowledge and healing (Bautista-Valarezo et al. 2020, p. 1).

In fact, the relationship between religiosity and mental health opens a perspective of study, insofar as it occurs in the new framework of a growing interculturality in all countries, so that a new horizon in the anthropological perception expressed in the different views of the concept of health becomes evident.

The psychological aspects of religiosity are a complex and fundamental sociocultural phenomenon. One study investigated a group of patients admitted to a psychiatric unit of a general hospital in Brazil. The distribution of diagnoses and length of hospital stay were related to religious affiliation. A greater functional psychosis and shorter length of stay were found in the Pentecostal group (Dalgalarrondo 1994, p. 325).

Studies on life attitudes reveal that better self-perceived health was associated with greater self-perceived religiosity in older adults. Those who considered religion to be very important were less likely to report fair or poor health compared with those who were less religious. These older adults had a high prevalence of religious affiliation and most of them considered religion to be important (Reyes-Ortiz et al. 2007, p. 425).

5. Conclusions

According to the results obtained from the literature on concepts such as family, culture, spirituality, identity, marriage and sexuality, we found that the research revolves around six main components: education, mental health, attitudes, psychological aspects, religion and gender.

In conclusion, the progressive growth of research in this field is evident; the annual production of scientific articles on religiosity continues to grow, manifesting a relevance that should encourage further deepening and scientific production around the concept of religiosity.

The use of new intelligent tools to follow, analyze and visualize the body of scientific research becomes an interesting and productive instrument that can be introduced in future scientific production, and brings a new perspective to the bibliographic wealth stored in the databases of high-impact journals, retaking and reevaluating past studies. Therefore, it is useful both to see the perspectives that are currently being published, and to deduce which perspectives are not being covered, thus serving to locate new fields of study on religiosity that have not yet been explored.

The main limitation of this study was the number of databases explored and from which documents were retrieved for the sample. The coverage provided by the Scopus database for the field of social sciences, which is the one we wanted to investigate, was considered appropriate and complete. However, this is a fairly broad field of study into which it is difficult to delve deeply in any particular discipline or area of knowledge. In this case, and anticipating future work complementing the present study in related areas such as education, consulting specialized databases in this discipline such as Eric or the Web of Science itself, which includes up to four thematic categories specific to education, could provide us in the future with a more specific and detailed view of the state and interest of the scientific community in aspects directly related to religiosity and education. A deeper analysis could even be carried out on the evolution of the number of specialized journals, as well as obtaining information on the sources and institutions that finance the studies. In addition, to think about the relation between gender studies and religion, it would be interesting to perform a study about religion on specific gender studies.

We propose two possible lines of future research:

The possible historical relationship between the origins of this term “religiosity” and the loss of temporal power of the Catholic Church after the Protestant schism.

The possible relationship between the current relevance of the term “religiosity” in sexual research (especially in journals of the so-called gender studies, with concepts such as gender ideology or sexual and reproductive rights) with the rejection of the adoption of the category of gender by some organized religions.