The theoretical rationale

Scholarship in the social scientific study of religion can be methodologically divided into two groups, the ‘generalisers’ and the ‘particularisers’ (Spickard, Landres & McQuire, 2002: 1).

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The generalisers often take a quantitative approach relying on survey data, membership lists, and observable and quantifiable practices. The quantitative methodology in social research on religion can be useful in the presentation and prediction of the overall trend of religious composition and landscape in a society (e.g., Pew Research Centre, 2012) and to devise generalisable theoretical schemes for the measurement of individual religiosity and

commitment (e.g., Stark & Glock, 1968). Whereas the particularisers who take a qualitative approach, are dedicated to document the minute details of specific groups of people, their religions in different levels of contexts that the people and religions are situated. In the research on religion, the quantitative approach can provide answers to questions such as how

many religious people there are in a society or how often people practice their religion (measured by religious service attendance or frequency of private religious practice). The

qualitative approach, for its part, can shed light on the ‘quality’, which is ‘essential to the nature’ of religious phenomena. The qualitative methodology aims to investigate the ‘meaning, concepts, definitions, characteristics, metaphors, symbols, and descriptions’ of religion, which constitute the ‘essence and ambiance’ of religion (Berg, 2007: 3). The aim of this thesis (see Chapter one, Section 2) requires a qualitative rather than quantitative

methodology, which explores religion as ‘diverse, complex and ever-changing mixture of beliefs and practices, as well as relationships, experiences, and commitments’ lived by its adherents (McGuire, 2008: 185).

This study takes lived religion as a theoretical approach (as mentioned in Chapter Two) to religion in the context of migration. In the last two decades, the study of ‘religion as practiced and experienced by ordinary people in the contexts of their lived everyday lives’ has emerged as an important theoretical approach to religion (McGuire, 2008: 96; see also in Hall, 1997; Orsi, 1997, 2003; Ammerman, 1987, 2007; Neitz, 2011). The lived-religion approach challenges the conventional academic treatment of religion in dichotomous terms, such as ‘public/private’, ‘political/domestic’ (Orsi, 2003: 173). Ammerman (2007: 9) recognises that boundaries between seemingly opposing realms, such as the religious and the secular, and the individual and the institutional, in real social life are ‘permeable’. This means that religion studied as people’s lived experience is ‘not necessarily private or internal’; ‘it is often practiced in public or in collective acts and understandings’ (Neitz, 2011: 54).

Taking a lived-religion approach, my research is informed by scholars such as Snow and Machalek (1983, 1984), Staples and Mauss (1987), and Jindra (2011), who have focused on the ‘retrospective narrative-based analysis of conversion testimonies’ (Williams, 2018: 2).

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However, the analysis of accounts of conversion experiences tend to emphasise the linguistic practices and semantic schemes of converts while neglecting the ‘embodied, sensual, and performative dimensions of conversion’ (ibid.). Thus, my study of Chinese migrants’ conversion to Christianity also takes into account the influence of institutional and wider social contexts in which Chinese migrant Christians are situated. It aims to understand conversion in a holistic manner.

This qualitative research can be described as ethnographic. In the family of qualitative methodologies, ethnography has been employed for my qualitative investigation as a distinctive methodology (a theory, a set of fundamental principles and practices, or specific methods). Ethnography, originally the investigative tool practiced by cultural anthropologists, has also been widely practiced by social scientists (Berg, 2007). Although the conceptual meanings, terminologies, and applications of ethnography can differ among different ethnographers, the ethnographic methodology ‘rests on a number of fundamental criteria’ (O’Reilly, 2009: 3). According to O’Reilly (2009:3), ethnography is ‘iterative-inductive research’ which requires the researcher to move iteratively and reflexively between research design, data collection, and analysis, and to use inductive reasoning to report research findings. Ethnographic research often does not proceed in a linear fashion. Rather, it is a ‘spiral’ progress (ibid.: 15), as will be substantiated below in the section on the recruitment of participants, the sampling of observational sites, and designing of questions for interview. The flexibility of ethnography allows a range of qualitative research methods to be used in ethnographic research. For this study, I have employed semi-structured interviews and multi- sited participant observation as the two main instruments for qualitative inquiry. Through semi-structured interviews, the data on how Christian conversion and migration are experienced and understood by my interview participants can be accessed and collected through verbal accounts of the participants. Mostly, the interviews have been audio-recorded, sometimes aided by the instantaneous note-taking and reflective notes after the interviews. As for the multi-sited participant observation, I have followed the lead of my participants into the Christian gathering sites where they are based. The method aims to gain insights into contextual influence on the participants’ conversion experience. At the preliminary stage of my research, I observed that although individual Chinese Christians are primarily situated in a specific Christian setting – a church congregation, a fellowship, or a Bible study group – there is also a dimension of mobility in their religious participations. In other words, people do not only participate in one single Christian gathering site, but also move between different

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Christian groups and participate in different communal religious events and activities. The mobility of my research participants requires the practice of participant observation in multiple settings in order to gather sufficient contextual information; hence the multi-sited ethnography. The remaining part of this section expounds on the specific practices in the semi-structured interviews, and on multi-sited participant observations in the research.