PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This book presents the results of longitudinal investigation of change and development that participants in the United States and in Germany have experienced in their life. We were interested in the changes of worldview and meaning-making that our interviewees associate with their religious, spiritual, agnostic and atheist identifications. For almost two decades, research teams in Chattanooga (U.S.A.) and Bielefeld (Germany) have invited and re-invited hundreds of people to participate in a personal interview and to answer an extensive questionnaire in order to better understand the reasons and the consequences of their continuity or discontinuity in religious, spiritual, or non-theistic worldview and meaning-making. After an account of the conceptual and methodological perspectives of our research (Part A), the chapters of this book present statistical analyses of aspects of change such as in religious development, in the semantics of spirituality, in moral foundations and in wisdom-related cognition and notions of intellectual humility (Part B). In Part C, we present case studies of participants who were interviewed three times. This selection of case studies covers the lifespan from emerging adulthood to old age and are the result of content and narrative analysis, related to the “classical” structural analysis of the FDIs according to the Manual for the Assessment of Religious Styles, and, in addition, triangulated with the survey data. We offer a most comprehensive depiction of religious and worldview development over the lifespan, based on the lives and opinions of persons who were willing to share their biographies and their views in three consecutive interviews across a time span of 15-20 years.