Todorović D. (University of Niš) CHALLENGES OF QUALITATIVE METHODOLOGY IN THE STUDY OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF ROMA (On the Example of the Protestantization of Roma in Southeastern Serbia)

Previous research into the religious life of Roma in Serbia has mostly been based on questionnaires and surveys of sociologists of religion on their religious (current connection to religion and church) and confessional (belonging to a religion) self-identification, on the ritual celebration of two religious-ethnic holidays: Vlasuljica (January 14, St. Basil) and Đurđevdan (May 6, St. George), on the relationship between the religious majority and the Romani religious minority and religious discrimination against Roma, as well as on the influence of ethnic-religious factors on the social distance towards the Romani people. Researchers have not, however, engaged in more complex understanding of the Romani religious culture and nuanced systematization of the manner in which believers interpret their own religious experience in the context of their natural surroundings. Particularly in the case of more recent phenomena in the Serbian religious market, such as the conversion of Roma to small religious communities and the way in which this process has been unfolding: missionary activity (evangelization), conversion, that is, proselytism (drawing believers). The paper describes a substantial research effort to detect Roma as a religious-confessional reservoir of Protestantization and the ways in which qualitative methodology is used to study the factors of the Romani association with Adventists, Baptists, Pentecostals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, the most numerous and agile representatives of the “third” branch of Christianity in southeastern