Part 3 - Digital Faith: From The Question To The Certainty

By: Gabriela Aurora Mondragón Meza   Source: IslamiCity Oct 6, 2024 No Comments


Part 1 - Mexican Women Converting to Islam in a Christian-Majority Society

Part 2 - Islamic Information to get Knowledge

She embraced Islam in October 2013, changed all her lifestyle from Christian beliefs and secular practices to Islam. Bachelor on Communication, Master in Education and second Master on Human Science graduated from the International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM) in 2020. Currently, she is an independent researcher.

The sample population in this study resulted in 14 respondents (see Table No. 1). The research criteria to participate were: "to be Mexican, a convert, and a practicing Muslim for more than three years, and living in Mexico during the period when the study was conducted."

A disclaimer needs to be made: conversion to Islam is different from practicing the religion. Conversion to Islam involves announcing the testimony of the Islamic faith, what Muslims call the *shahada*, while practicing the religion involves following the religion and making some lifestyle changes according to the requirements of Islam.

For practical purposes in this study, "practicing Muslim" is understood as a person who has announced the Islamic testimony of faith, performs prayers, and fasts during the month of Ramadan. However, this is a practical definition that needs to be discussed and defined in future research papers.

The narrative interview was the most suitable research instrument for this study because it allows for engaging the respondents using narrative and storytelling as sense-making tools (Riessman, 2008). The interview was divided into four parts:

  1. general data and current situation,
  2. information needs,
  3. information seeking, and
  4. information use.

The researcher collected data until reaching redundancy in the interviewees' answers or achieving theoretical saturation—when there is no need to collect more data due to repetition of the same information among respondents (Flick, 2009; Patton, 2002).

After the respondents submitted their answers, the raw data were gathered in the ATLAS.ti software for analysis. After reading and listening to the interviews several times to familiarize themselves with the raw data, precoding, coding, and subcoding were conducted as a starting point for the three main concepts of the Sense-Making Theory (Dervin, 1983) and ISB:

  1. situation,
  2. information need,
  3. information seeking,
  4. information use.

After coding, patterns appeared and themes emerged from the answers (see Figure 4 for a map of codes, subcodes, and themes).

Table no. 1

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