Students of Religion Studying Social Conflict Through Simulation and Modelling: An Exploration

Abstract

Researchers at our university use modelling and simulation (M&S) to study religious conflicts, and we wanted to introduce undergraduate students of religion to this research approach. Hence, we started a three-year educational design research project to empirically study ways to introduce these students to M&S as a viable research method in their discipline. The research project will entail several iterations, which aim to have a feasible and effective design of lessons and a better understanding of the learning processes. The first iteration was exploratory and is reported here. For this exploration, we organised a seminar, which was videotaped for post hoc analysis. The seminar started with an introduction of research methods to study violent human behaviour, comparing experiments in which people are exposed to violence in real and virtual worlds. Afterwards, the students explored an agent-based simulation based on Schelling’s segregation model. The seminar was concluded as a plenary discussion. After the seminar, follow-up interviews were held with three students. The results suggest that this brief intervention enabled students to gain a good understanding of the way in which M&S can be used to study social conflicts and opened them up to the possibility of adopting the method in their future research. We also found that for an initial understanding of the use of M&S in social research, no knowledge of computational methods is required.