This article examines the quality and rigor of the academic literature on radicalization. Drawing on a sample of 260 publications that make claims for empirical research and were published between 1980 and 2010, it shows that qualitative approaches dominate, and that a significant number of publications relies on secondary sources-not primary research-to support their conclusions. Methodologies tend to be stronger and more rigorous in the social sciences than the humanities. Overall, it finds that research on radicalization contains clusters of excellence that meet the highest scholarly standards, but that it also suffers from some of the same problems that afflict the wider field of terrorism studies: 34 percent of the items in our sample were either methodologically or empirically poor, whereas 11 percent were both. The article argues that this situation may have resulted from an overreliance on (poorly controlled) government money, the nature of the subject itself, and the absence of a unified academic "field" through which tougher academic standards could be enforced.

No abstract

Although much is now known about religious conversion in general, there is still relatively little known about how and why conversion to Islam takes place in the United States. Expanding on previous research, the current study examines types of conversions among United States Muslim converts. Seventy-three converts to Islam, all United States residents, provided detailed qualitative descriptions of their personal experiences of religious conversion through a free-response item. Using consensus coding, multiple coders classified these responses according to Lofland and Skonovd's (1981) conversion motifs typology. Researchers also categorized responses using natural language processing and machine learning text analysis techniques. Results indicate that conversions to Islam in the United States have predominantly intellectual motifs. These results reinforce previous research findings, indicating that across cultures and temporal cohorts, converts to Islam tend to actively seek meaning and purpose, feel illuminated upon encountering Islam, and come to believe in Islam before they participate in its practices. Based on manual coding, 58.9% of our sample described their conversion experiences in ways that matched criteria for the intellectual motif. This was substantiated by the results of our computational text analysis, which found that 68.5% of conversion experiences semantically corresponded to the intellectual motif.

No abstract