The Diversity Of Worldviews Among Young Adults

Contemporary (Non)Religiosity And Spirituality Through The Lens Of An International Mixed Method Study

Peter Nynäs, Ariela Keysar, Janne Kontala, Ben-Willie Kwaku Golo, Mika T. Lassander, Marat Shterin, Sofia Sjö, Paul Stenner

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9783030946906
• eBook ISBN: 9783030946913
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Psychology of Religion

This open access volume features a data-rich portrait of what young adults think about the world. It collects the views of students in higher education from various cultural regions, religious traditions, linguistic groups, and political systems. This will help readers better understand a generation that will soon rise to power and influence.

The analysis focuses on 12 countries. These include Canada, China, Finland, Ghana, India, Israel, Peru, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, and the USA. It employs a mixed-methods approach, invested in the study of an individual's views and values using state-of-the-art methodology, including the innovative Faith Q-sort. This instrument is new to the field and developed for assessing the entanglement of subjective views and personal beliefs. The study also incorporates a comprehensive values survey as well as other survey tools that look into people's social capital, media use, social values alignment, and subjective well-being.

Each chapter is co-authored by an international team of scholars with research interest in the particular topic. The rationale for this principle is the need to engage individuals from different cultural backgrounds, scholarly disciplines, and methodological and substantive competences. In the end, this innovative approach presents an informed, empirically grounded analysis of the values and worldviews of the future generation. It sheds an important light on how changes in the religious landscape are intertwined with broad and diffuse processes of socio-economic and global cultural change.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. A Multinational Study on Young Adults and Contemporary (Non)religion: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches
• 2. Young Adults as a Social Category: Findings from an International Study in Light of Developmental and Cohort Perspectives
• 3. Who Are They and What Do They Value? – The Five Global Worldviews of Young Adults
• 4. Family Resemblance in Variations of Contemporary Religiosity and Spirituality: Findings from a Cross-Cultural Study
• 5. Common Patterns of Religion and Spirituality: A Contribution to the Discussion on Typologies
• 6. Searching for Uncommon Worldviews: ‘Idiosyncratic’ and ‘Divided’ Outlooks in a Global Sample of Young Adults
• 7. Who Relates to the Divine as Feminine? Transnational Consensus and Outliers Among Young Adults
• 8. The Global Variation of Non-religious Worldviews
• 9. Gendered Views Among Young Adults in a Global Study: Male and Female Worldview Prototypes
• 10. Prosociality in an International Perspective: Civic Engagement and Volunteering
• 11. Conservative and Liberal Values in Relation to Religiosity
• 12. On the Subjective Well-Being of University Students: Religious Capital and Experiences of Discrimination
• 13. Minority and Majority Positions: The Religious Subjectivities and Value Profiles Among Muslim Students in Israel and Turkey
• 14. The Role of Religion in Society and Public Life: Perspectives Among Young Adults in Post-Communist Russia and Poland
• 15. Beyond the Secular, the Religious and the Spiritual: Appreciating the Complexity of Contemporary Worldviews
• Back Matter