Researching a city's faiths : methodological notes from the coalface

Abstract

In late 1992, the Department of Religious Studies and the Institute for Theological Research at the University of South Africa embarked on a joint research project that would last for three years. The purpose of the project was to survey the religious situation in Pretoria, to discover who was here, how many of them there are, and what these people do. A philosophical approach was adopted that stressed pluralism and interdependence. The objective was not to produce a neat encyclopædia of religions in Pretoria, with each tradition organised under a separate heading, but rather to determine the interaction among religious groups, to establish the scope and variety of religious traditions present here and to find trends in the religious lives of Pretorians. The final result of the project will be a book written by Professor JS Krüger and Mr M Clasquin. In this essay I intend to describe the methodology of our project in a narrow sense of the term. I shall describe how the project was launched, how data was gathered, processed and interpreted, and how the project was administered. It is hoped that this will be of value to future researchers who intend to survey the religious dynamics of a specific area. To this end, certain recommendations will also be made from time to time.