Abstract
The Bielefeld-based Cross-cultural Study of “Spirituality” aims at an in-depth understanding of what people call “spirituality.” For this aim, a multi-method design has been applied. Self-report instruments such as psychometric scales were used with a large sample in Germany and the USA. Our sampling procedure, aiming at capturing the varieties of being “spiritual,” resulted in a sample of 1113 participants in the USA and 773 in Germany. This chapter introduces the instruments which were compiled for our questionnaire, the Faith Development Interview , and the Implicit Association Task which we used with a selected smaller sample. The chapter also describes the construction of “focus groups ,” groups defined according to participants’ self-identification as “spiritual,” as “religious” or as “atheist /non-theist.” These focus groups have been used to structure the sample with respect to positions in the religious field . They were also used for the selection of participants for personal interviews, the Faith Development Interview (FDI), and an experiment, the Implicit Association Test (IAT ). The characterization of the focus groups concludes the chapter.
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Notes
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The oversampling of higher educated persons may be secondary effect of this, if the observation of Berghuis, Pieper and Bakker (2013) for the Netherlands can be extrapolated. They conclude from their representative study that “spirituality” is an “elite” word (p. 391).
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Keller, B., Streib, H., Silver, C.F., Klein, C., Hood, R.W. (2016). Design, Methods, and Sample Characteristics of the Bielefeld-Based Cross-Cultural Study of “Spirituality”. In: Streib, H., Hood, Jr., R. (eds) Semantics and Psychology of Spirituality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21245-6_4
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