Whatever their private religious convictions, nearly all contemporary psychologists of religion – when they act in professional roles – agree to operate in accordance with scientific rules. Recognition of the imperfections of individual methodologies has led to an emphasis on testing theories and verifying “facts” in multiple studies. Most of this chapter explores the pros and cons associated with various research methods, including experimentation, observation, and survey research. Although the logic of experimentation is undeniable and psychologists in various subfields frequently deem it the method of choice, many questions that we most want to answer in the psychology of religion cannot be addressed through experiments that are feasible, ethical, and convincing. Thus, the psychology of religion has always relied heavily on quantitative and qualitative survey research studies. Good surveys must strive to avoid biases rooted in question wording, question order, mode of data collection, social desirability, attitude-behavior discrepancies, and the tendency to overreport religious behavior. Fortunately, many existing measures of religious attitudes and behaviors have good psychometric qualities.

Little in mainstream society indicates that when we choose it, solitude can be wonderful, even transformative. Instead, the focus on loneliness in modern life can make us think that solitude is a disease requiring treatment, and maybe cured by avoiding solo moments altogether. Until recently, science has supported those assumptions because decades of prevailing research have focused on humans as “social animals” and the fact that fulfilling relationships are integral to well-being. By comparison, scientists have spent very little time and resources on understanding the role of solitude, and the power of positive solitude in particular, in shaping our lives. That’s why we three researchers with very different backgrounds formed our Solitude Lab and have spent several years researching what time alone means to different people around the world. In Solitude, we share those insights from thousands of people from all walks of life who helped us to redefine and reframe time alone as a chosen place, a zone of truth, sincerity, independence, and intimacy where we can best connect with our values, interests, and emotions.

The chapter author, Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen, who uses non-binary pronouns, is a sociologist of law and globalization who studies, among other things, inequality and identity in the legal profession. They identify as “a global south queer with … ‘local north’ advantages.” Their chapter considers how identity and vulnerability – and not merely ideas – build critical legal theory. Specifically, Ballakrishnen argues that complicated legal and social hegemonies create outsider status, but the process of making hidden identities visible creates closeness, camaraderie, and change in our scholarship. Data, like identity, is not neutral, though both are often valorized in that way. And the law, Ballakrishnen writes, is also very much like identity in that both are “predicated on trust, exchange, and power, and each, when moderated with self-reflexive vulnerability, hold within them the capacity to belong, break-open, and build anew.”

The author of this chapter, Lynette J. Chua, is a scholar of law and resistance originally from Malaysia, educated in Singapore and the US, and working in Singapore. She says that across these diverse contexts she has “always been drawn to being, and [has] always been out of place.” Chua reflects on how her out-of-place positionality enabled her to write her first two books. It was her own out of place positionality that she says first drew her to “out-of-place movements,” which allowed her to see “the strength of human agency to forge resistance against [legal] odds.” Being out of place in so many ways is what enabled her to see the importance of emotions and relationships for human rights activists, a central theme of Chua’s work on Myanmar.

The chapter provides a critical reflection on how the author, Leisy J. Abrego, conceptualizes, conducts, analyzes, writes up, and presents her research projects. As a “mestiza from a working-class background,” the author does not have the luxury of deciding to distance from or “intellectualize” oppression. However, she sees colleagues who come from majority groups do this with relative ease. The author is a sociologist who studies how legal violence is perpetrated against migrants and its effects on their legal consciousness. The result is pathbreaking and interdisciplinary scholarship that is “simultaneously humanizing and rigorous,” and that fosters community through an “accompaniment” with immigrants rather than a study of immigrants.

Positionality in research refers to the disclosure of how an author’s self-identifications, experiences, and privileges influence research methods. A statement of positionality in a research article or other publication can enhance the validity of its empirical data as well as its theoretical contribution. However, such self-disclosure puts scholars in a vulnerable position, and those most likely to reveal how their positionality shapes their research are women, ethnic minorities, or both. At this stage of the field’s methodological development, the burdens of positionality are being carried unevenly by a tiny minority of researchers. In this book, we spotlight a group of scholars from around the world who shaped the field of law and society through their intentional awareness of how their self-identifications, experiences of marginalization, and professional privileges influenced their research questions, design, methods, and writing about the law.

The chapter explains how being out of place can paradoxically put one back in place – or exactly where one needs to be to achieve their research goals and values. The author, Margaret Boittin, is a lawyer and US-trained political scientist who works in a Canadian law faculty. She explains how being out of place is relative. She may not be out of place in North America as “a white woman with blond hair and blue eyes,” but she was obviously out of place when she was studying sex workers in China. Embracing this outsider status also became the source of her strength during fieldwork and later in the academy. Boittin concludes with a reminder about the exhaustion of being out of place but also with gratitude to the many respondents – sex workers, their clients, and police – who felt comfortable with her precisely because she was an outsider.

In the final chapter, the legal anthropologist Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (1946–2022) reflects on 45 years of ethnographic fieldwork on legal pluralism in Indonesia and the Netherlands. In her fieldwork, and across her career, von Benda-Beckmann writes, she would begin as a “total stranger” and then slowly turn into a “familiar outsider.” She felt out of place as a lawyer in social science and as the descendant of a Dutch colonial sugar plantation administrator. She often conducted fieldwork with her husband, which meant that “We came as a family and had to divide our time between doing research and the children.” Von Benda-Beckmann reminds us all that across a long and successful career, simply “being there” is ultimately what shapes our relationships and our ability to find “remarkable continuity” in the law across different times and places.

The chapter is a reflection on the “unsafe” and “painstaking work” of observing rape trials. The author, Pratiksha Baxi, a leading sociologist of gender, learned Indian law and medical jurisprudence on her own during her fieldwork, through conversations with lawyers, observing trials, and reading books. However, her outsider status as a non-lawyer and as a woman led various people in the courtrooms where she conducted fieldwork to “scold” her for studying rape trials. The out-of-place feeling from fieldwork followed her long afterward, like a trauma. Though her fieldwork took place two decades earlier, the “anger and grief” never went away. However, she concludes, that, “If law’s attachment to cruelty continues to mark the self, then the ability to love and be in solidarity is the necessary condition for living with the field.”

The chapter reflects on the tension that the author, Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, felt when other scholars identified her too closely with her study participants, who like her are Black South Africans. Their shared background seemed to taint or decrease her scholarly credibility, she writes. While this perspective of being a young African woman studying other young African women gives her some insider status, it also shapes how other academics see her, how study participants see her, and how she has come to see herself. Mnisi Weeks is a scholar of gender, Indigenous rights, and constitutionalism in South Africa, as well as race in the United States. However, her marginalized identity in the law sapped her authority in the centers of patriarchal power where the law resides – both in the communities she has studied and in the academy “whose default representative is a white, middle-aged, European and/or American male locked in a single discipline.”

Massoud discusses in the Introduction the benefits and costs of open and principled discussion of positionality. He draws on a longitudinal study he conducted of major law and society journals to argue that scholars who are women, ethnic minorities, or both unevenly carry the burdens of positionality. Massoud encourages law and society scholars of all backgrounds to adopt a “position sensibility” by examining and explaining how their own self-identifications, privileges, or experiences shape and challenge research methods.