Spirituality and new Forms of Religion
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CIRRuS > Research Disciplines > 'Biographical Studies in Contemporary Religion' > Spirituality and new Forms of Religion >
  

Publications

Streib, H. (2008). More Spiritual than Religious: Changes in the Religious Field Require New Approaches [pdf]

Streib, Heinz & Hood, Ralph W. (2011). “"Spirituality" as Privatized Experience-Oriented Religion: Empirical and Conceptual Perspectives”. Implicit Religion 14.4: 433 - 453. Pdf

Press Release

2012-03-06 press release

Here is a summary about first results:[Summary.pdf]

Spirituality in Germany and U.S.A.: Analysis of the Semantics, Psychological and Sociological Correlates and Biographical Contexts of a Self-Attribution

It is not clear what the self-identifications religious and spiritual today to those who identify with them really mean. According to recent results, including our own study on deconversion, the preference for the self-identification of being spiritual is rather spectacular, especially for the U.S.A.. More recent surey results such as the Religion Monitor or the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), Religion III confirm the increasing popularity of this self-attribution. However, survey results portrait the contours of developing secular and religious orientations, but are short in information about the semantic and functional characteristics and about the socio-biographical and psychological correlates of these contemporary orientations.

The aim of this project therefore is the differential cross-cultural (comparing Germany and U.S.A.) analysis of contemporary forms of the respective self-identifications as characterized by their positive or negative relation with religious traditions and with secular orientations. The foci in the first step of research working with group comparisons between secular and religious milieus are: (a) semantic analysis of spiritual self-identifications in context of related self-identifications which then (b) will be compared to established spirituality scales; (c) we will also explore personality traits, attachment, psychological well-being, religious schemata, pro-social attitudes and social status, in order to assess the socio-biographical and psychological correlates of spirituality in the total sample And with quantitative methods. With sub-samples which will be selected on the basis of the quantitative analysis, our second step of research is focusing on qualitative approaches and assesses the semantics of spirituality (qualitative approach), in relation to wisdom-related performance, faith development and biographical trajectories based on auto-biographical narratives - which opens a diachronic perspective on the interaction of cultural and individual developmental trajectories.

Professores Streib and Hood (IAPR Congress 2009 in Vienna); Dr. Barbara Keller; Christopher F. Silver

Begin and End of the Project: 01.11.2009-31.12.2012

Project Leader: Herr Prof. Dr. Heinz Streib

Primary Research in Bielefeld: Frau Dr. Dipl. Psych. Barbara Keller

External co-operation partners: Prof. Ralph W. Hood, Jr., University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, U.S.A. and Christopher Silver, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, U.S.A..

 

This research project is funded by the German Research Foundation / Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.