PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This paper shows how corpus methods can be usefully employed in the field of psychology of religion. Current international surveys mirror an ongoing transformation in subjective meanings in religious discourse cumulating in the question: What do people actually mean when they describe themselves as spiritual, religious or neither? The paper presents results of a cross-disciplinary study with 1,886 participants in the USA and Germany. The thematic goal is to explore subjective understandings by examining the language use of participants who wrote personal definitions of religion and spirituality. Methodologically, we aim to bring forward the search for new mixed-method approaches in corpus linguistics. For the first time, the study introduces a corpus linguistic approach to empirical studies in the field of psychology of religion and shows how a search for textual patterns can become an integral part within a comprehensive research design which includes further quantitative and qualitative social-empirical instruments.