Video-Podcasts

From May 24 to 29, 2020, our Summer School has taken place, but it was hosted digitally because, due to the Corona-pandemic, an in-person meeting in Bielefeld was not possible. This Summer School was intended as a service for researchers from all over the world, regardless of the country, religion or culture in which they study religious change and development. We believe that – especially in such challenging times as today – a transnational scientific exchange about questions regarding religion and worldview is more needed than ever.

The summer school had the threefold aim of (a) familiarizing with and discussing theory and methods (including hands-on learning) for studying change and development of religion and worldview in the psychology of religion and related disciplines, (b) assisting researchers, who are engaged in research with a developmental approach, or intend to include a developmental perspective in their research, in the elaboration and refinement of their research designs, and (c) promote the networking among young and experienced researchers in this field of study.

For more than two decades we are dealing, in a series of cross-cultural studies, with the following basic question: How are forms of religiosity and worldview changing over an individual’s life-span? Thematic foci of research questions so far were: deconversion, self-identified “spirituality,” and xenophobia/xenosophia. In the more recent years, we are expanding into longitudinal investigation by re-interviewing and surveying participants for a second and third time. 

Our mixed-method design combining interviews (Faith Development Interviews) with extensive questionnaires allowed us to collect experience in interviewing, interview evaluation for structure (religious styles and types), content and narrative, and relating these to psychometric scales in the questionnaire data. Thus, rather than separating nomothetic and idiographic approaches, we have taken steps toward operationalizing their complementarity.

As the interviews demonstrate, most people are implicitly or explicitly aware of changes that have occurred in their life. Almost everyone can tell their autobiographical story about (religious) changes, which sometimes follow the plot of growth and development, sometimes of conversion and finding a new religious or spiritual home, sometimes of discontinuity, deconversion, disaffiliation or simply losing interest in questions of religion and worldview.

How is this rich and diverse personal knowledge reflected in the psychology of religion? Of course, in the early years of our discipline, conversion was on top of the agenda of psychologists of religion. However, centrifugal trajectories such as apostasy or deconversion drew the attention of psychologists of religion only decades later. And developmental changes in religiosity that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s are still rather at the margins of our field. Thus, there is need for a new and integrative approach. Thereby it needs to be taken more seriously in research that, for example, changes in the semantics such as the preference of self-identifying as “spiritual” or “more spiritual” may reflect developmental changes in a person’s life – as well as diverse and changing cultural and social contexts.