Faith in Development: Mixed-method Studies on Worldviews and Religious Styles

How has faith developed in the US and German societies across the last decades? In a three-wave longitudinal investigation of faith development, this study presents the changes of worldview and meaning-making that people associate with their religious, spiritual, agnostic and atheist identifications. For almost two decades, research teams in Chattanooga (USA) 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 faith.

Heinz Streib is a senior professor at Universität Bielefeld, Germany, and conducts research in the psychology of religion. He established and directs the »Research Center for Biographical Studies in Contemporary Religion«. He is editor-in-chief of the »International Journal for the Psychology of Religion«. His research focuses on biographical-reconstructive and psychometric assessment of religious change and development over the lifespan, deconversion, fundamentalism, xenophobia and the semantics of spirituality.

Ralph W. Hood Jr. is a professor of psychology, LeRoy A. Martin Distinguished Professorship of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and UT Alumni Association Distinguished Professor. He is a past president of the Division 36 of the American Psychological Association and a recipient of its William James award for research in the psychology of religion.