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Dimensions of Religion and Spirituality: A Longitudinal Topic Modeling Approach
Author(s) -
Kim SeongHyeon,
Lee Narae,
King Pamela Ebstyne
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal for the scientific study of religion
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.941
H-Index - 71
eISSN - 1468-5906
pISSN - 0021-8294
DOI - 10.1111/jssr.12639
Subject(s) - popularity , transcendence (philosophy) , topic model , spirituality , longitudinal study , longitudinal data , matching (statistics) , psychology , structural equation modeling , latent variable , sociology , computer science , epistemology , social psychology , information retrieval , statistics , mathematics , artificial intelligence , philosophy , data mining , medicine , alternative medicine , pathology , machine learning
In lieu of the traditional text data analysis methods, structural topic modeling was utilized to analyze the text contents of 255 self‐report inventories of religion and spirituality (R/S) published from 1929 to 2017. The study had two objectives: (a) to clarify and identify the latent dimensions of R/S inherent in the items of the measures; and (b) to examine and demonstrate the usefulness of a longitudinal topic modeling in the study of R/S. We identified 5,617 unique text terms from the measures and fitted topic models on those terms to extract latent dimensions called topics. We also simultaneously analyzed the longitudinal effect of publication decade (i.e., 1950s–2010s) on the topics. A topic model with three topics was chosen to best support the data: Experience of Transcendence (Topic 1), Engagement in Transcendence (Topic 2), and Essence of Transcendence (Topic 3). In addition, the longitudinal analysis revealed that Topic 1 showed a continual increase over the decades, while Topics 2 and 3 both demonstrated a gradual decrease, in effect matching the general trend of Topic 1's increasing popularity in society and the academia.