Longitudinal Investigation of Developmental Change in Religiosity in Germany with the Faith Development Interview and Psychological Scales: Matching Funds for our Project in the U.S. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Heinz Streib
• Subject Area: Protestant Theology
• Term: from 2015 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 271081487

James Fowlers theory of faith development has influenced practical theology in the U.S.A. and in Germany, and here especially religious education and pastoral care, to implement a perspective of change and development of religiosity over the lifespan. Fowlers theory also has inspired dozens of research projects, which mostly were studies using the faith development interview (FDI) as instrument. However, in the relatively long and respectable tradition of research in faith development, there is no major study with a longitudinal design. Thus, strictly speaking, developmental change in faith has never been evidenced empirically. Instead, all empirical results rest on the documentation of age specific preferences for specific faith stages, which then are interpreted in a framework of unquestioned conceptual assumptions which are suggested in the structural-developmental tradition. With more than 500 FDIs (mainly from the DFG-funded research projects on deconversion and the semantics of spirituality), with ca.90 FDIs with Islamic respondents, and with more than 500 persons who indicated readiness for an interview, but have not been contacted so far, the Bielefeld Research Center for Biographical Studies in Contemporary Religion has the unique privilege of a considerable data base and a solid starting point for a longitudinal study in faith development across the adult years in the wide range of religious persuasions and world views which characterizes pluralistic, religiously diverse societies. Parallel to a Project in the U.S. that is funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, this first phase of 30 months of the new project in Germany implements a longitudinal design. It starts with a first round of FDI reinterviewing, planned for 2015, and constructs, with all data available, a FDI German sample of ca. 500 persons who will be reinterviewed in 2020. Research with the FDI proceeds primarily interpretatively, but results can at least partially quantified and imported in SPSS data bases. In our qualitative FDI evaluation, and this is innovative, we focus not only on structural developmental religious operations, but also on narrative coherence, attachment, mentalization, and wisdom. On the basis of a questionnaire with detailed demographics and a number of scales, such as personality (NEO Five Factor Inventory), attachment, psychological wellbeing and growth (Ryff), generativity (LGS), intolerance of ambiguity, centrality of religion, religious fundamentalism, belief in God and religious schemata (RSS), psychological predictors and correlates for developmental change over time can be assessed and analyzed. The project thus combines quantitative and qualitative approaches, and can also capitalize on the experience already accumulated in Bielefeld. Thus, it is the aim of this project to respond to the desideratum of providing clear empirical evidence about religious development and its conditions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants