Introductions

We are LMR, which stands for Love, Marriage and Religion.  We are a research center studying the relationship between love, marriage and religion among younger adults in the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and the West.  Using social network sites to mount anonymous web-based surveys, we have collected data on tens of thousands of respondents in Egypt, Iran, Tunisia and Turkey, as well as the United States and Europe.  We are interested in the ways in which religiosity shapes modern gender norms, romantic intimacy, sexual behavior and marriage both in the Islamic and the Christian worlds. There is a politics to intimate life.  We want to understand both the political causes and consequences of the emerging generations’ understandings of gender, romance and marriage.   And we are exploring the methodological benefits and costs of using Facebook and other social network sites for sampling compared to traditional random sampling.

We have given lectures on our work at Sabanci University, Istanbul, NYU Abu Dhabi, the American University of Sharjah, Cardiff Business School, University of California Los Angeles, University of California Santa Barbara and the University of Innsbruck. 

Through social network sites and blogging networks we have received tens of thousands of responses to our surveys from Egypt, Iran, Tunisia and Turkey.  

We are LMR-UCSB, which stands for Love, Marriage and Religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Our team members include:

Janet Afary is Professor of History and Religious Studies, UCSB.  Afary has written on the history of sexual politics in Iran. 

Roger Friedland is Professor of Religious Studies and Sociology, UCSB.  Friedland has written on the religion and love among American university students.

Paolo Gardinali is Director of the Benton Survey Research Center, UCSB and an expert is survey research and web-survey design.

We also blog about our work at Huffington Post.

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