Religion: Why do people join cults?

We’re currently researching and scripting a couple of films on secularisation and New Religious Movements and a spin-off from this, as you may have noticed, is a range of religion resources either based on stuff we’ve found – NRM Pathways and NRM Characteristics – or stuff other people have already produced. This post falls into […]

New Religious Movements: Five Pathways

In a previous Presentation we identified a range of defining characteristics of New Religious Movements and this Presentation compliments this work by identifying and outlining the general characteristics of five different, but frequently interrelated, types of NRM. The Presentation is based on Daschke and Ashcraft’s (2005) categorisation of “five interrelated pathways” into membership of New Religious […]

New Religious Movements: 6 Characteristics

Basic PowerPoint Presentation, designed for whole-class use, that identifies Barker’s 6 characteristics of New Religious Movements. The concept of New Religious Movements was initially developed, by writers such as Eileen Barker (1999), to reflect a general unease and dissatisfaction with the contemporary usefulness of the “sect – cult” distinction. More-specifically, the argument in favour of […]

Longitudinal Studies: Animated Explanations

Although longitudinal studies, such as Wikstrom’s PADS (“Peterborough Adolescent Development Study”: 2002 – 2010) research – designed to understand how families, schools and communities shape young people’s social development – are a well-established and hugely-valuable source of comparative data, teaching them as part of an a-level Sociology research methods course can be a little, shall […]

Understanding Media and Culture: Free Textbook

Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication (to give it its full title) is a textbook, released under a Creative Commons licence by the University of Minnesota, that’s free to read, copy and share – which makes it especially useful for schools / colleges or students on a tight budget. Under this particular […]