PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This chapter has a special focus on the question how “spiritual” self-attribution is related to religious development. Do the “spiritual”/“religious” self-identifications and self-ratings as “spiritual” change together with the religious style/faith stage? Do subjective understandings (semantic versions) of “spirituality” change from one stage to the other or differ between specific configurations of religious styles? In the Bielefeld-based Cross-cultural Study of “Spirituality,” we interviewed a selection of more than one hundred of the 1886 respondents using the Faith Development Interview (FDI). FDI ratings were completed for 54 respondents in the USA and 48 in Germany. This chapter presents results about the relation of faith development/religious styles and “spirituality” both qualitatively and quantitatively. In regard to the qualitative analysis, the case studies from previous chapters are discussed in a synoptic view. Quantitative evaluation is possible on the basis of a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data, after results from FDI evaluation were re-entered in the quantitative data base, which contains, for example, each interviewee’s response to the Religious Schema Scale, to the self-rating as “religious” and “spiritual,” but also information about the respondents’ semantics of “spirituality.” Results indicate that the faith stages/religious styles relate to age, to self-ratings as “spiritual” and “religious,”,” and to the semantics of “spirituality” – which allows the identification of style-specific semantic profiles.