Sample Exercises -

If you have trouble with the following searches, see the "Helps" section below.

Find the following in the ATLA Religion Database:

• An article on "church planting" (more than 10 pages). Look near the bottom of the bibliographic record for this article. What "subject" is used for the topic of "church planting"? Search for articles with this "subject."
• An article on Genesis 11.
• A book review of the book Growing in the Life of Faith, by Craig Dykstra.
• How many articles (not books, not book reviews) can you find that have been written by Craig Dykstra? What are the two journals in which he has published most of his articles?
• Find a good English-language article or essay on St. Augustine's use and interpretation of the Psalms.

Helps:

For the above searches one could do simple keyword searches and have a measure of success. But for more elegant, focused searching, you might take a look at the instructions for Searching Research Databases .

For the above searches here are a few tips:

• You should note that in the ATLA Religion Database, one could search for "Genesis 11" in the "Scripture Citation Phrase" field.
• You can limit your results to "book reviews," "articles," or "essays" (articles within edited books).
• You can search for journal articles in a specific journal by using the fields "Source" or "Source Phrase."
• You can also limit by language, if, for example, you want only English-language items.
• You can get better quality "hits" if you use the "Subject" field. For example, instead of searching simply for "Augustine" and "Psalms" as keywords, search for these terms in the subject fields of the database.

Sample Exercises:

• Find an article written by Scott Hoezee.
• Find an article about a worship service celebrating the Ascension in the journal Reformed Worship.
• Find an article about tithing in the Christian Reformed Church's magazine, The Banner.

2000 and 1990 Census information is available from the Census Bureau and can be accessed using American FactFinder, an interactive search tool which presents data in tabular or map formats. The SF 3 (2000) and STF 3 (1990) are frequently used because they contain socio-economic information.

Two excellent guides to finding census information are available online from the University of Michigan: Census Toolkit and Grace York's American FactFinder and Census 2000 powerpoint slides.

Sample Exercise -

Find the 2005 American Community Survey Data for a community near you, e.g., Las Vegas, Nevada. (Note that this 2005 information is not available for all communities).

Sample Exercises -

• Use the search feature to find a recent (post-2000) survey on the topic of prayer.
• Work through one of the "Learning Modules" found on ARDA. The learning modules are topic driven explorations into the numerous datasets that can be found on the site. Currently there are modules that guide the user through empirical data on the American religious landscape, evangelicals, seminarians, and the relationship religion holds with opinions on science, gender roles, homosexuality, politics, and crime.
  

Exercises:

• Find a recent article about Islam. (Use the "find" feature in your browser).
• Get access to the most recent issue of a major newspaper in a city near you or one of your favorite magazines. (See the left-hand column of resources - newspapers, book reviews, magazines, blogs, etc.)