Chris J. Boyatzis

Exploring Adolescent Spiritual and Religious Development: Current and Future Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

Spirituality and religion are central dimensions of human experience. Youth and adults alike report high levels of religiosity. A Gallup International Association (1999) poll of 50,000 adults in 60 countries found that 87% of respondents report being a part of a religious denomination, 63% indicate that God is highly important in their lives, and 75% believe in either a personal God or “some sort of spirit or life force.” Other data (Gallup & Bezilla, 1992) show that 95% of American youth aged 13–17 believe in God, and 75% “very much” or “somewhat” agree with the statement “I try to follow the teachings of my religion.” In addition, 42% of American youth claim that they frequently pray alone, and 36% report participating in a church youth group and 23% in faith-based service projects. Adolescence may be a particularly important time period in which to study spiritual and religious development (Donelson, 1999; Gorsuch, 1988). In adolescence, many youth turn toward religion and greater civic involvement, and yet many others who turn away from religion join either gangs or hate groups, or become antisocial in other ways. Thus, adolescents’spirituality and religiosity can be articulated and engaged, stifled and thwarted,ormisdirected.This is anageperiodof intense ideological hunger, a striving for meaning and purpose, and desire for relationships and connectedness (e.g., Erikson, 1968). Adolescents “move beyond concrete childhood impressions of religion to reflect on issues and concepts that are embedded in existential and transcendental realms” (Markstrom, 1999, p. 205). From one theoretical perspective (Fowler, 1981), most young people in adolescence progress from having a tacit commitment to the views of important reference groups around them to possessing a more “owned” and personalized faith, one that arises from critical introspection of one’s own beliefs and values. Despite its importance, adolescents’ spirituality and religion have been relatively neglected in the developmental sciences.Recentanalysesofsocial-sciencedatabases found that less than 1% of the articles on children andadolescentsaddressedspiritualityorspiritualdevelopment (Benson, Roehlkepartain, & Rude, 2003) or religion and religious development (Boyatzis, 2003). However, a new field of spiritual and religious development is emerging. For example, evidence is confirming positive links between adolescents’ involvement in religion and many desirable developmental correlates (e.g., Donahue & Benson, 1995; Wagener, Furrow, King, Leffert, & Benson, 2003). The purpose of this special issue is to add to the growing empirical base on adolescent spirituality and religiosity. We hope to shed light on definitional and methodological challenges in this field and reveal new topics, research designs, and statistical procedures that will expand our understanding of spirituality and religion in adolescence. Our goal is that the issue is relevant for researchers and practitioners.

The protective role of attachment to God against eating disorder risk factors: concurrent and prospective evidence.

This short-term longitudinal study explored whether a secure relationship with God would protect young women (N = 231, M = 19.2) from the impact of four risk factors for eating disturbance: pressure to be thin; thin-ideal internalization, body dissatisfaction; and dieting. Analyses showed that women with secure attachment to God experienced reduced levels of each risk factor. Prospective data showed that pressure to be thin and thin-ideal internalization predicted body dissatisfaction only for women with an anxious insecure attachment to God. The data indicate that women who feel loved and accepted by God are buffered from eating disorder risk factors.

RESEARCH: Quest Orientation in Young Women: Age Trends During Emerging Adulthood and Relations to Body Image and Disordered Eating

The college and early adulthood years-the period of emerging adulthood-entail dramatic changes in identity and faith, but little is known about age trends in Quest orientation across these years. Further, nothing is known about the links between Quest and body image and eating behavior. We addressed these issues in 3 groups of young women: college freshmen and sophomores (n = 57,Mage 18.5 years), college juniors and seniors (n = 43, M age 21 years), and college graduates tested 3 years after graduation (n = 51, M age 25 years).Women completed the Quest Scale, Body Esteem scale, and the Eating Disorder Inventory. Age differences emerged, as college juniors and seniors were significantly higher on total Quest than freshmen and sophomores and marginally higher than recent graduates. The groups differed on 2 of the 3 subscales. Juniors and seniors were significantly higher on Doubting as Positive than freshmen and sophomores, and were significantly higher on Openness to Change than freshmen and sophomores and recent graduates. Relations between womens total Quest scores and body image and eating scores varied by age, as Quest in freshmen and sophomores correlated significantly with higher bulimia and body dissatisfaction. Total Quest was unrelated to body image and eating scores in the other age groups. The findings are discussed in terms of developmental processes during emerging adulthood.

INTRODUCTION: Advancing Our Understanding of Religious Dynamics in the Family and Parent—Child Relationship

This special issue contains four original empirical articles that address links between religion and family functioning. The articles are marked by many desired attributes: a rich combination of novel variables and constructs, a sampling of a diverse set of religious groups, and multiple measures of religiosity. The data analyses here not only examine between— group effects and direct links between religiosity and parenting or child outcome but also offer a more complex and interesting set of findings. Specifically, the authors have found provocative interaction or mediation effects between different religiosity measures in relation to parenting behaviors or child outcomes. Collectively, the four articles illuminate how the various dimensions of religiosity can play a powerful role in the family.

Examining Religious and Spiritual Development During Childhood and Adolescence

What does “spirituality” look like in a child? Does religion make a genuine difference in the lives of children and youth? How do we measure spiritual and religious development in children and adolescents? How can we characterize religious and spiritual development in its processes, sequences, and stages? These are a few daunting challenges facing our field, and I will address them here (to varying degrees of thoroughness). I first examine the historical neglect and recent attention regarding spirituality and religion and childhood and adolescence. Second, I explore definitional challenges inherent in this field. I then offer a selective review of very recent research literature that illuminates key issues in three emphases in the field: children’s religious concepts, social dynamics that influence religiosity and spirituality, and religion’s role in adolescent wellbeing and thriving. In addition, I problematize some assumptions about religious and spiritual development by challenging their implicit foundations derived from developmental theory.

The Role of Parental Psychological Control and Warmth in College Students’ Relational Aggression and Friendship Quality

This study investigated the role of perceived parental psychological control and warmth in college students’ friendship quality and use of relational aggression with peers. College students (N = 237) completed self-report measures assessing their relational aggression, friendship quality, and parents’ perceived use of psychological control and warmth. As predicted, college students’ relational aggression partially mediated the relation between perceived parental psychological control and friendship quality. Moderation analyses indicated that perceived parental warmth exacerbated the negative effects of perceived parental psychological control on college students’ relational aggression and friendship quality. Thus, perceived parental psychological control is associated with students’ elevated relational aggression and poor friendship quality, especially when parents are viewed as warm as accepting.

Progress on nature and nurture: Commentary on Granqvist and Nkara's ‘Nature meets nurture in religious and spiritual development’

This commentary addresses several key ideas in the Granqvist and Nkara (this issue) conceptual piece on the need for a more sophisticated understanding of how nature and nurture interact to influence religious and spiritual development. Cultural and genetic factors are explored.

Introduction to the British Journal of Developmental Psychology special issue on religion, culture, and development

Religion is a near-universal phenomenon, yet only 0.5% of all peer-reviewed PsycINFO articles contain the keyword children and the keyword religion; for articles with religion and adolescence, the incidence is 0.8%. The literature, therefore, does not reflect the degree to which children and adolescents may be affected by religion. However, whereas the previous decade (from 2000 to 2009) featured around 800 peerreviewed articles with keywords children and religion, in just the first half of the current decade (2010–2015), there are over 700 such articles with those keywords. This special issue pushes our field forward with cutting-edge research and theory on not only children and religion, but also on culture. The papers elucidate the impact of micro-level factors, such as parents and family, and macro-level factors, such as cultural ideologies.

God in the bod: charting the course of research on religiosity and the body

This special issue on God in the Bod: Links between Religion, Spirituality, and Embodiment represents a milestone in the psychology of religion: the first special issue dedicated to this important topic. This is not to say the topic is a new one. For millennia, religion has had a deep and complex relationship with how people have viewed and treated their bodies. From the Buddha’s self-starvation to medieval era saints who engaged in “holy fasting” to cases of twentieth-century women who used their religious beliefs to justify and perpetuate anorexic behaviour, religion has been intertwined with the body. Recent societal trends have increased awareness of these complex dynamics, as the pervasive “thin ideal” in Western culture and increasing sexual objectification of women (and, increasingly, of men) has resulted in subclinical and clinical consequences, including a rise in disordered eating (Pike, Hoek, & Dunne, 2014). In fact, the first published studies on the body in the psychology of religion seem to have been precipitated by clinical necessity. Several case studies in the early 1990s focused on religious issues in eating disorder patients (Banks, 1992, 1996, 1997; Ford, 1992; Graham, Spencer, & Andersen, 1991; Hsu, Crisp, & Callender, 1992), illustrating both problematic and helpful ways in which religious concerns interfaced with symptoms. These were followed by more systematic quantitative studies, largely in eating disordered and at-risk samples (e.g., Smith, Hardman, Richards, & Fischer, 2003). In the last 10 years, the research has moved beyond clinical concerns to an examination of religion and the body in non-clinical samples (e.g., Boyatzis &McConnell, 2006;Mahoney et al., 2005). By 2008, enough research had been conducted to warrant a review article (Boyatzis & Quinlan, 2008), and the research literature has burgeoned since then to result in a second literature review updating and expanding the earlier one (Akrawi, Bartrop, Potter, & Touyz, 2015). At the risk of over-simplification, both reviews conclude that when religion is significantly related to women’s body image and eating behaviour, the relationship is typically a positive, healthy one; however, these relationships emerge for some dimensions of religiosity and not others. The studies in this special issue help reveal further depths and complexities in these god-in-the-bod associations. Research in this area is becoming more programmatic, more sophisticated in its methodology, and is expanding to encompass a greater variety of constructs from the fields of body image research and psychology of religion. Some of these recent developments are illustrated in the articles selected for this special issue. These articles underwent a rigorous peer-review process and were selected from a wider pool of submissions. We discuss these articles through two lenses: the lens of psychology of religion, and the lens of body image research.