New year, new class, new progress...new project?

The new school year started with a 2-hour delay due to weather.  That first week ended approximately 2-hours early, also due to weather.

I have a new batch of SOCL 3000 students (*waves hi*) to follow along, and hopefully the alumni who inspired me to start this are still hanging in there. Because I have new students that I'm practicing the art of research with, this will be a bit more regular in the postings.

First, an update on the neo-paganism and family religiosity paper.  It was accepted for presentation at the Religion in Society conference at UC Berkeley in San Francisco.  I'm going to try to not wear tie-dye the whole time, but cannot promise to go without flowers in my hair and be a complete hippy geek at the corner of Haight and Ashbury.

On that front, I will be finished entering the surveys I have so I can do some preliminary analysis.  I have started doing interviews and I will likely not have as many of those done, but that is okay. I am presenting it as a "working paper," so it doesn't have to be as final as most papers.

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For the new students, as always, I am trying to work along with them, so I've chosen to resurrect the research on something related to belief in UFOs.  I am not sure whether the alien abduction angle (which is where this idea started) is broad enough, so at this point, the planning stage, I'm going to broaden it out.  I find it interesting that this still is something that people do believe in, but I'm not sure why they do, and if they do, do they share that information with others, especially if they think they've seen a UFO or an alien, or even been abducted.

In thinking about this, it seems that some people may be more likely to have these beliefs than others.  I know women are more likely to believe in alternative spiritualities (from my other research) so may be they are more likely to believe in aliens too. I also know the stereotype of the 'drunk redneck' who sees the UFO, so I wonder if social class matters. There was also an article I found that suggested that political affiliation and religion matter too (Swami, Furnham, Haubner, Stieger, and Voracek 2009).  So those might all be variables I would want to look at.

If I had to make a prediction right now, I would probably guess that women, members of lower socioeconomic classes, politically liberal, and people who not religious would all be more likely to believe in aliens than would those who are not in these group.

REFERENCES

Swami, Viren, Adrian Furnham, Tanja Haubner, Stefan Stieger, and Martin Voracek.  2009.  "The Truth Is Out There: The Structure of Beliefs About Extraterrestrial Life Among Austrian and British Respondents." Journal of Social Psychology 149:29-43.