Outcomes of Life-span Development of Religious Styles: Changes in Symbolizing Transcendence and in Responding to the Strange. Matching Funds for a simultaneous application to the John Templeton Foundation

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The questions that this project will have the potential to answer is, whether, how, why, and when in their lifetime individuals are changing their religion and worldview. Interpreting such changes as migrations between a series of developmentally ordered religious styles and religious types, this project will focus on the outcomes of religious development (a) for changes in people’s images of God and, in more general terms, their symbolization of transcendence, and (b) for people’s changes in prejudice and, in epistemological terms, their response to the Strange. This research will be able to answer these questions using longitudinal data and taking a multi-method approach: Based on (faith development) interviews (FDI) and questionnaire data, this project continues to investigate the dynamics of religious change from idiothetic and nomothetic angles that are treated as complementary. Thus, this project is stating an example of how the combination of idiothetic and nomothetic approaches works.After completing our current project (JTF Grant 60806, „Faith Development Revisited“), this project includes a 4th wave of field work using the FDI and our questionnaire to furnish analyses with sufficient statistical power. We also continue the dissemination of our methodological expertise in workshops and webinars, and will establish and certify a standard for FDI evaluation. The proposed study will, like the current and previous projects, be administered by Bielefeld University, with research teams at both Bielefeld University and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), with H. Streib as PI in Bielefeld, R. Hood as cooperation partner at UTC, and Z. Chen (Clemson University) as consultant. We also consider cooperation with D. van Tongeren (Hope College) and N. DeWall (University of Kentucky) who are planning a major cross-cultural, quantitative study on deidentification.