The Pluralism Project at Harvard UniversityMethodology for the Pluralism Project Directory Data
The Pluralism Project has been researching immigrant religious traditions in the United States for over a decade. We have research affiliates across the U.S. who have provided lists of centers based on their on-site field research. We invite the users of our website to send us information as well, and have been including the addresses of centers that have been submitted over the years, as well as changing and deleting addresses. Often our advisors have assisted us in staying abreast of changes in contact information, and newspaper articles have advised us of the opening of new religious centers.
We clean the data by receiving updates from our affiliates, cross-checking with other lists, phone call verification (often associated with area code updates), selected mailings, checking for duplicate records, and collaborating with information sources within the religious communities. Where possible, we have emailed the centers' contact people to ask them to provide us with updates as necessary.
We verify and expand the data by consulting center lists available on the web. A list of these resources is available online. Wherever possible, we consult the center's website itself, and we list these websites in our online directory. For the Buddhist tradition, center lists for various schools within the tradition have been helpful, as has the Dharma Directory published by Tricycle. The publishers of Hinduism Today have graciously shared their extensive list of Hindu centers, updated through repeated mailings. Our advisor Pravin Shah has provided us with updated information on Jain centers. Sikhnet lists Sikh gurdwaras, and for the Zoroastrian tradition, FEZANA lists associated member centers, as well as small groups. Yellowpages.com has been helpful.
In the fall of 2001, the data was extensively revised in preparation for inclusion in the second edition of On Common Ground: World Religions in America. Ours is a work in progress, always subject to revision. We allow centers to self-define, and a very small regular gathering of a few religious practitioners would qualify as a religious center. The addresses, along with phone numbers and websites where possible, are on the web at http://pluralism.org/directory, and are searchable and sortable by tradition, state, and center name, etc. We do our best to keep up with changes to provide accurate contact information for the interested public, but obviously cannot guarantee the accuracy of all information, which is constantly changing. Also we maintain a working compilation of estimates of statistics for the overall numbers of members in religious traditions in the U.S., available online at http://pluralism.org/resources/statistics.