PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Religious educators are very often among the first professionals in the schools that are called in situations of escalating violence. The religious educators should be good-enough experts about the role that (different versions of) religion play in promoting resp. preventing prejudice and deviance. Could we base such expertise on empirical evidence? On the basis of most recent data from an online-questionnaire research project that we have conducted in our Bielefeld Research Center for Biographical Studies in Contemporary Religion on youth violence, adolescent religion, and mediation in schools, the paper sheds light on the dimension that is not well investigated in previous studies on adolescents (at least in the research on adolescents in Germany): the differential role of religiosity and religious cognition. Thus, our results thus are not only a contribution to the research on German adolescents, and thereby attending to a lost dimension, but they also address questions of the research design in this domain.