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Chapter 2. Methodology This dissertation is based on qualitative analysis of various types of data. While the specific method(ologie)s of each empirical chapter will be elaborated there, this section will briefly delineate five general methodological considerations: • Which disciplines and fields I situate this work in and how (cultural sociology, the sociology of religion, media studies); • what this dissertation is not (theological, deductive, quantitative, representative, effects research, nuanced); • which approach was taken as a consequence (to formulate a grounded theory, ‘sensitized’ by an encoding/decoding framework); • what methods were used concretely and why (interviews, content analyses, some ethnography); • what data those resulted in.

2.1. Discipline / fields This dissertation is positioned on the cross-section of three disciplines: cultural sociology, the sociology of religion, and media studies. This matters only as a starting point to make sense of what I am trying to do in the dissertation. Readers from across the communication sciences, religious studies, game studies and other related fields should hopefully be able to make sense of and engage with it.

By calling this dissertation cultural-sociological, I mean that I study culture as collective meaning: as a socially shared system of meaning-making between individuals.

In this project, I try to bring what Jeffrey Alexander calls the “cultural structures that regulate society into the light of the mind” (2003; p. 3-4), by understanding them from the individual level up. Cultural sociologists usually refer to Weber’s Verstehen as a 47