Research Plan»
«Research Plan
The European Reformation was a major transformative movement in the 16th century which overthrew the monopoly of the Catholic Church. Due to this and other major social transformations, the Reformation provides and example of social change, a change in social relations between people which transforms social institutions. Within my doctoral thesis I will analyse exemplary driving factors of this social change from a network perspective.
These factors include:
- inner-protestant conflicts, like the one between the Lutherans and the Reformed denominations.
- social differentiation, a process in society, where people increasingly become more specialised in the tasks and roles they fulfil.
- confessional formation, the adoption and institutionalisation of Protestantism.
- individual mobility of reformers.
Besides this content-based focus, I will also address the methodological problem of "unobserved" data. Since historical records are subject to the selection bias, our resulting data samples may be unrepresentative for the Reformation as a whole and bias our analysis. Within my doctoral thesis I will quantify this bias and explore methods for network reconstruction.
My full research plan, describing the research topic, the research gap and research questions in more detail, can be found here.
