In order to examine our three questions, we need objective research methods. Estimating whether a treatment can work, does work, and has value requires a wide range of research strategies. Evidence establishing that a treatment works under controlled conditions does not necessarily assure benefits when the intervention is applied in clinical practice. This chapter considers the development of a research protocol, and biases that might be attributable to participant recruitment, enrollment, retention, and dissemination of findings. In practice, establishing the value of a treatment should consider an examination of the existing literature, development of thorough research plans, recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of the chosen research methods, and integration of study results within a wider body of knowledge. We challenge beliefs in a hierarchy of methods that assumes some methods, such as the RCT, are free from bias.

This chapter outlines future research directions to advance understanding of sexual minority and gender diverse (SMGD) individuals and their relationships by advocating for the examination of cultural and legal contexts that shape SMGD experiences across nations. Additionally, this chapter argues that future research should address minority stress processes and resilience factors, with attention to couple-level outcomes and mechanisms connecting stigma to health and incorporate intersectionality to elucidate how multiple marginalized identities interact. Methodological considerations for future research are also presented. Lastly, this chapter discusses translational priorities including community outreach, tailored interventions and programs, legal advocacy utilizing research evidence, educational initiatives, and technology-enabled solutions tailored for SMGD individuals. This chapter concludes with an integrated perspective on open questions, methods, and real-world applications to guide the next phase of research and practice aimed at promoting justice and well-being for SMGD individuals globally.

The investigation of singular practices and actions is the bedrock of Conversation Analysis (CA), yet it is not the only approach that CA research can take. This chapter poses a series of analytic questions designed to guide the analyst’s attention towards a complementary mode of analysis, one which takes as its object of study not a singular practice but rather a system of practices, alternative solutions to a recurrent problem of social organization. While this approach has been employed to greatest effect in research on generic organizations of interaction, the analytic techniques are themselves generic and applicable across domains of action. Rather than select a practice or action and ask what forms it can take or what environments it can inhabit, conversation analysts can instead select a problem, an exigency of social interaction, and ask how participants solve it. Alternative practices and actions naturally cluster around the organizational problems to which they serve as possible solutions, and it is this endogenous organization that CA research aims to document. The chapter sketches out and illustrates a range of analytic techniques that conversation analysts have employed in past research and can employ again to discover and investigate organizations of practice.

While the preceding chapters of the Handbook have focused on practical skills in CA research methods, this chapter looks towards the path ahead. A diverse group of conversation analysts were asked to outline possible projects, point readers toward un- or under-described interactional phenomena, and discuss persistent issues in the field. The contributions address future advances in data collection, specific interactional practices, the complex interplay between language and the body, and cross-cultural and crosslinguistic comparisons, among other issues. The chapter concludes with a concise reiteration of the bedrock principle that underpins all CA research methods.

Whatever their private religious convictions, nearly all contemporary psychologists of religion – when they act in professional roles – agree to operate in accordance with scientific rules. Recognition of the imperfections of individual methodologies has led to an emphasis on testing theories and verifying “facts” in multiple studies. Most of this chapter explores the pros and cons associated with various research methods, including experimentation, observation, and survey research. Although the logic of experimentation is undeniable and psychologists in various subfields frequently deem it the method of choice, many questions that we most want to answer in the psychology of religion cannot be addressed through experiments that are feasible, ethical, and convincing. Thus, the psychology of religion has always relied heavily on quantitative and qualitative survey research studies. Good surveys must strive to avoid biases rooted in question wording, question order, mode of data collection, social desirability, attitude-behavior discrepancies, and the tendency to overreport religious behavior. Fortunately, many existing measures of religious attitudes and behaviors have good psychometric qualities.

Little in mainstream society indicates that when we choose it, solitude can be wonderful, even transformative. Instead, the focus on loneliness in modern life can make us think that solitude is a disease requiring treatment, and maybe cured by avoiding solo moments altogether. Until recently, science has supported those assumptions because decades of prevailing research have focused on humans as “social animals” and the fact that fulfilling relationships are integral to well-being. By comparison, scientists have spent very little time and resources on understanding the role of solitude, and the power of positive solitude in particular, in shaping our lives. That’s why we three researchers with very different backgrounds formed our Solitude Lab and have spent several years researching what time alone means to different people around the world. In Solitude, we share those insights from thousands of people from all walks of life who helped us to redefine and reframe time alone as a chosen place, a zone of truth, sincerity, independence, and intimacy where we can best connect with our values, interests, and emotions.

The chapter author, Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen, who uses non-binary pronouns, is a sociologist of law and globalization who studies, among other things, inequality and identity in the legal profession. They identify as “a global south queer with … ‘local north’ advantages.” Their chapter considers how identity and vulnerability – and not merely ideas – build critical legal theory. Specifically, Ballakrishnen argues that complicated legal and social hegemonies create outsider status, but the process of making hidden identities visible creates closeness, camaraderie, and change in our scholarship. Data, like identity, is not neutral, though both are often valorized in that way. And the law, Ballakrishnen writes, is also very much like identity in that both are “predicated on trust, exchange, and power, and each, when moderated with self-reflexive vulnerability, hold within them the capacity to belong, break-open, and build anew.”

The author of this chapter, Lynette J. Chua, is a scholar of law and resistance originally from Malaysia, educated in Singapore and the US, and working in Singapore. She says that across these diverse contexts she has “always been drawn to being, and [has] always been out of place.” Chua reflects on how her out-of-place positionality enabled her to write her first two books. It was her own out of place positionality that she says first drew her to “out-of-place movements,” which allowed her to see “the strength of human agency to forge resistance against [legal] odds.” Being out of place in so many ways is what enabled her to see the importance of emotions and relationships for human rights activists, a central theme of Chua’s work on Myanmar.