Molteni, Francesco

Presentation

If I had to choose a sentence to define my approach, I would reverse the very famous quote by W. Edwards Deming to obtain “without an opinion (or a theory) you’re just another person with data”. This because I believe in the strong connection between theory and data, and I really think that theory comes first. Only after a robust theoretical reasoning it comes the need to find the best way to put it under test, and this is what I really love to do!

I hold a PhD in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research, and I am currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milano. My interest in sociology of religion started with my PhD when I decided to work on the empirical test of the well-known Norris and Inglehart’s existential insecurity theory. Starting from this many things followed. From the strong emphasis on religious transmission and cohort replacement as main drivers of religious change to the emerging field (at least in Italy) of immigrants’ cultural and religious assimilation. Meanwhile, I also did my best to make my methodological bases stronger. I am very committed to survey methods, and I massively work with multilevel models to perform robust comparative analyses as well as to test very broad theories such as that about secularization.

My work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Social Forces, Sociology of Religion, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, European Societies, and the British Journal of Sociology. I have also published with Brill the book "A Need for Religion: Insecurity and Religiosity in the Contemporary World", and I am the Principal Investigator of the project “Between Origin and Destination (BOnD)” https://www.spstrend.it/between-origin-and-destination/.

Areas of specialization

• Sociology of religion
  • Secularization theory
  • Existential Insecurity Theory
  • Comparative study of religion
  • Religious evolution over time
  • Generational change and religious transmission
  • Immigrants’ religiosity
• General sociology
  • Comparative study of values
  • Cultural Assimilation
  • Attitudes toward immigrants and immigration
     
• Methodology
  • Survey Methods
  • Multidimensional measurement
  • Comparative analysis
  • Multilevel modelling
  • Age-period-cohort issues