Alexey M. Dvoinin
Candidate of Psychological Sciences, Reader, Department
of Psychology, Institute of Educational Psychology and Pedagogy, Moscow
City University, Moscow
alexdvoinin@mail.ru
Valeria Carroll
Candidate of Psychological Sciences, Senior Lecturer,
School of Health and Social Care, University of Lincoln, Lincoln
vcarroll@lincoln.ac.uk
Methodological dilemmas of assessing the
meaning-making process among individuals with various religious belief
systems
Abstract
The article highlights the difficulties of assessment of the
meaning-making process among religious individuals and the problem of
the development of new assessing instruments. Empirical methods widely
known in psychology of personality, as authors argued, are constructed
and based on secular samples and are not suitable for studying the
meaning-making process of individuals with various religious belief
systems. Psychologists have to construct methods, which eliminate the
shortcomings of the questionnaires, and make the capturing of the
meaning making in its complexity, nonlinearity and dynamism possible. An
interdisciplinary approach could help in going this way.
Key words
meaning-making process, assessment of
meaning making, religious belief system, methods of assessment of
meaning making.
__________
Двойнин Алексей Михайлович
кандидат психологических наук, доцент департамента психологии,
Институт педагогики и психологии образования, Московский городской
педагогический университете, г. Москва
alexdvoinin@mail.ru
Кэрролл Валерия
кандидат психологических наук, старший лектор, Школа здоровья и
социальной работы, Университет Линкольна, г. Линкольн
vcarroll@lincoln.ac.uk
Методологические проблемы диагностики процесса смыслообразования у личностей с различными системами религиозных
убеждений
Аннотация
В статье освещаются трудности диагностики процесса
смыслообразования у религиозных людей и проблема разработки новых
оценочных инструментов. Как утверждают авторы, эмпирические методы,
широко известные в психологии личности, построены и основываются на
светских выборках и неприложимы для изучения процесса смыслообразования
у лиц с различными системами религиозных убеждений. Психологам следует
конструировать методы, которые были бы лишены недостатков опросников и
дали бы возможность зафиксировать смыслообразование в его сложности,
нелинейности и динамике. В этом мог бы помочь междисциплинарный подход.
Ключевые слова
процесс смыслообразования,
диагностика смыслообразования, система религиозных убеждений, методы
диагностики смыслообразования.
__________
For the last years the progressive increase of migrant populations
all over Europe including the UK and Russia has facilitated erosion of
old forms of religiosity and the formation of new ones, with special
meaning systems. One would agree that meaning-making process is core to
person’s well-being; however academics and practitioners still struggle
to identify methods, which help them to capture the meaning making of
individuals with various religious belief systems as a complex,
dynamic and nonlinear mental process. The
article is aimed
to describe these methodological dilemmas of assessing the
meaning-making process among individuals with various religious belief
systems.
Existing differences in design and methods, methodological limits,
and focusing on one or two aspects of meaning making, etc.
[23] create methodological
dilemmas in assessment; empirical studies lag far behind rich conceptual
developments, and operational definitions – from well-developed
theoretical constructs [6,
25, 31]. Due to this, academics and practitioners feel a lack of
a valid method to explore meaning making as a complex, dynamic and
multidimensionality mechanism. The implementation of such innovative
methods will allow them to identify individual differences in
meaning-making systems among individuals with various religious belief
systems.
The complexity of focusing on studying religious and spiritual
meanings is related to heterogeneity in meaning structures
[24]. Religious meaning
making can lead to positive consequences – coping with distress and
painful troubles [11, 15,
18] or to negative ones – pessimistic religious interpretations
that complicates physical diseases [20]. As it was
found in studies, beliefs and religious practices themselves have a
special ability to provide ultimate meaning [21], however, as it was
found in a study, a verbally expressed religious orientation is not
connected with the level of meaning in life directly [8, 10].
The literature analysis shows that overwhelming majority of the
existing measuring tools directed to assessment of meaning structures is
based on self-reported questionnaire methods (e.g., “Purpose in
Life Test” (PIL) [3],
“The Meaning in Life Questionnaire” (MIL)
[28], “The Schedule for
Meaning in Life Evaluation” (SMiLE) [12], “Life Regard Index”
(LRI) [7], “The Seeking of Noetic Goals Test” (SONG)
[4], etc.) and has
substantial limitations and shortcomings. Questionnaire methods:
- are more focused on the diagnosis of separated components of
global meaning systems (beliefs/goals/subjective sense of
meaningfulness; see the model of life meaning by C. Park
[22]);
- do not cover dynamics of meaning making, its complexity and
nonlinearity;
- can impose categories in advance, labeling complex mental acts
of respondents and make capturing “lived” meaningful experiences
impossible;
- do not reflect the social conditions of the
meaning-making process;
- are not culturally free and are based on studies of people who
live in economically and politically developed countries with high
level of education and social responsibilities.
In addition, trying to measure “meaning in life”, researchers often
measure a sense of meaning in life or of goal-directedness [1].
Many research studies lose the social and cultural background of the
meaning-making process. However, this aspect is very important: global
meaning systems are usually constructed unwittingly, acquired from the
surrounding culture (including parents, media, and other cultural agents),
through accumulated personal life experience
[1, 27], and tend to
remain outside of people’s awareness [1, 26]. In conducting
their studies, researchers remain aware of the strong influences that
culture exerts on the global meaning systems of individuals, including
their religious meanings [e.g.,
29]. Nevertheless,
measures of religiousness sometimes do not reflect sensitivity to
cultural variables [ 2].
One might argue that there are already specifically constructed
measuring tools targeted at meaning-making domains of individuals with
various religious belief systems, however the few that are available
measure not so much the
meaning-making process, as much as
meaning systems and hence are aimed at a slightly different task.
For example, they are: the subscale “Religious Methods of Coping to Find
Meaning” within the method “RCOPE” [19], the subscale
“Existential Well-Being” within “Spiritual Well-Being Scale” [17]. Despite the special
focusing on the category of believers, these techniques are also not
devoid of the described shortcomings of the questionnaires.
P.C. Hill & K.I. Pargament pointed out the limitations of self-report
methods when studying religious subjects:
- Some aspects of religion and spirituality may be inadequately
measured because they are difficult to articulate through closed-ended
questions.
- Religion and spirituality may be especially susceptible to a
social desirability bias.
- Such scales may require reading levels beyond the ability of
children, poorly educated adults, and some clinical populations.
- Some paper-and-pencil measures may be boring or disengaging,
thereby fostering a potential response set bias [14].
Taking into account an interest of researchers who study meaning
systems in religious and non-religious contexts to dynamic processes
[30], psychologists have
to develop methods that will reconstruct meaning-making process of
respondents with various religious belief systems and corresponding
forms of religiosity, to avoid the shortcomings of questionnaires.
Interdisciplinary perspectives on the problem of adequate understanding
of meaning making allow us to highlight an aspect such as the
applicability of the methods to the study of contemporary forms of
religiosity.
Contemporary sociologists and scientists of religion show that the
traditional forms of religiosity and religious identity with
well-defined meaning systems are being transformed in the context of
globalization and migration. So, the phenomenon of “religiosity without
belonging” is captured in the United Kingdom [5]. Other researchers
describe phenomena of diffuse or indefinite religiosity: “bricolage”
[13],
“patchwork-religiosität” [33],
“mixed religiosity” [9],
etc. Hence, traditional cross-cultural and cross-confessional paradigm
with its comparative view becomes inadequate in studies of meaning
making because “cross-sectional designs are limited as they do not
capture changes in meaning overtime” [23, p. 499]. Thus, the
developers of innovative methods are recommended to apply an
interdisciplinary approach that allows the making of such assessing
instruments, which can be used by psychologists, psychotherapists,
social workers, health care workers, sociologists and scientists of
religion to solve various problems: adaptation of immigrants to new life
circumstances through meaning making, enhancing the resilience,
well-being and life satisfaction of persons who are in crisis or who are
in search for meaning.
If we consider the meaning-making process as a product of an
individuals’ cultural development in their social environment, L.S.
Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory can be performed as a good example of
implementation of the interdisciplinary approach.
From the standpoint of L.S. Vygotsky’s theory [32], the meaning systems
are formed through assimilation of verbal and non-verbal signs which
start to mediate mental functions in the process of child’s cultural
development. Assimilated signs become cultural tools which individuals
use in his or her meaning making. Meaning systems are derived from the
individual’s actual life relations based on cultural meanings and value
templates previously learned from society
[16]. Application of
socio-cultural theory suggests an original approach in developing new
methods to explore the meaning making of persons having various
religious beliefs in the context of the cultural tools that they have
assimilated. According to this, we propose to analyze the assessing
capabilities of the methods among representatives of different religious
groups in dissimilar cultural environments, where they are both a
confessional majority and a minority.
Taking into account all of the above, we can draw some conclusions
about the current state of assessing methodologies of the meaning making
of individuals with various religious belief systems:
- Empirical methods widely known in psychology of personality (e.g.,
PIL, MIL, SMiLE, LRI, SONG, etc.) are constructed and based on secular
samples and are not suitable for studying the meaning-making process of
people with religious beliefs: without capturing specifically religious
meanings, they give a simplified, biased or distorted picture of
believers’ meaning systems. New methods that are going to be developed
in the future must be applicable and relevant to individuals with
various religious belief systems.
- Psychologists have to construct methods, which eliminate the
shortcomings of the questionnaires, and make the capturing of the
meaning making in its complexity, nonlinearity and dynamism possible.
The methods do not have to reduce substantially the complex processes of
the meaning making to simple ones, but to reconstruct them in the form
in which they proceed.
- If to apply interdisciplinary approach to development of the new
assessing instruments, in particular L.S. Vygotsky’s socio-cultural
theory, the innovative methods has to take into account the historical,
social and cultural context of the meaning-making process of believers.
The methods have to consider cultural mediation of meaning-making
processes, and so therefore will be applicable to studying religious
persons with various social characteristics.
- Existing approaches to measuring the meaning making of a believer
are based on traditional forms of religiosity. The new methods have to
be adapted to capturing the modern non-standard forms of religiosity and
the corresponding meaning systems.
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[Data obrashcheniya 01.12.2017]
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Psikhologicheskoe issledovanie religioznosti sovremennoy
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Рекомендовано к публикации:
Е.В.Пискунова, доктор педагогических наук, член Редакционной коллегии
Литература
-
Park, C. L. & George, L. S. (2013). Assessing
meaning and meaning making in the context of stressful life events:
Measurement tools and approaches. The
Journal of Positive Psychology,
8(6), 483–504.
-
Davis, C. G., Wortman, C. B., Lehman, D. R., &
Silver, R. (2000). Searching for meaning in loss: Are clinical
assumptions correct? Death Studies,
24, 497–540.
-
Schlegel, R. J. & Hicks, J. A. (2017). Reflections
on the scientific study of meaning in Life.
Journal of Constructivist Psychology,
30, 26–31.
-
Thompson, S. C., & Janigian, A. S. (1988). Life
schemes: A framework for understanding the search for meaning.
Journal of Social and Clinical
Psychology, 7, 260–280.
-
Park, C. L. (2017). Distinctions to promote an
integrated perspective on meaning: Global meaning and meaning-making
processes. Journal of Constructivist
Psychology, 30(1), 14–19.
-
Emmons, R. A., Colby, P. M, & Kaiser, H. A. (1998).
When losses lead to gains: Personal goals and the recovery of
meaning. In P. T. P. Wong & P. S. Fry (Eds.),
The human quest for meaning (pp.
163–178). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
-
Krok, D. (2015). Religiousness, spirituality, and
coping with stress among late adolescents: A meaning-making
perspective. Journal of Adolescence,
45, 196–203.
-
Pargament, K. I. (1997).
The psychology of religion and coping.
New York: Guilford Press.
-
Pargament, K. I., Koenig, H. G., Tarakeshwar, N., &
Hahn, J. (2001). Religious struggle as a predictor of mortality
among medically ill elderly patients: A two-year longitudinal study.
Archives of Internal Medicine,
161, 1881–1885.
-
Pargament, K. I., Magyar, G. M., & Murray-Swank, N.
(2005). The sacred and the search for significance: Religion as a
unique process. Journal of Social
Issues, 61(4), 665–687.
-
Двойнин, А. М. (2011). Смысложизненные ориентации
религиозной личности. Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского
гуманитарного университета. (Серия IV. Педагогика. Психология),
22(3), 139–151.
-
Dvoinin, A. M. (2013). Value and meaning
orientations of the religious individual. In H. Westerink (Ed.),
Constructs of meaning and religious transformation (pp.
297–316). Vienna: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht unipress.
-
Crumbaugh, J. C., & Maholick, L. T. (1964). An
experimental study in existentialism: The psychometric approach to
Frankl’s concept of noogenic neurosis.
Journal of Clinical Psychology,
20, 200–207.
-
Steger, M. F., Frazier, P., Oishi, S., & Kaler, M.
(2006). The meaning in life questionnaire: Assessing the presence of
and search for meaning in life.
Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53, 80–93.
-
Fegg, M., Kramer, M., l’Hoste, S., et al. (2008).
The Schedule for Meaning in Life Evaluation (SMiLE): Validation of a
new instrument for meaning-in-life research.
Journal of Pain and Symptom
Management, 4, 356–363.
-
Debats, D. L. (1998). Measurement of personal
meaning: The psychometric properties of the Life Regard Index. In P.
T. P. Wong & P. S. Fry (Eds.), The
human quest for meaning (pp. 237–259). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
-
Crumbaugh, J. C. (1977). The Seeking of Noetic Goals
Test (SONG): A complementary scale to the Purpose in Life Test.
Journal of Clinical Psychology,
88(8), 900–907.
-
Park, C. L. (2005). Religion and meaning, In R. F.
Paloutzian & C. L. Park (Eds.),
Handbook of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (pp.
295–314). New York: Guilford Press.
-
Baumeister, R. F. (1991).
Meanings of life. New York:
Guilford Press.
-
Singer, J. L., & Salovey, P. (1991). Organized
knowledge structures and personality: Person schemas, self schemas,
prototypes, and scripts. In M. Horowitz (Ed.),
Person schemas and maladaptive
interpersonal patterns (pp. 33–79). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
-
Silberman, I. (2005). Religion as a meaning system:
Implications for the new millennium.
Journal of Social Issues, 61(4),
641–663.
-
Tarakeshwar, N., Stanton, J., & Pargament, K. I.
(2003). Religion: An overlooked dimension in cross-cultural
psychology. Journal of Cross-Cultural
Psychology, 34, 377–394.
-
Chatters, L. M., Taylor, R. J., & Lincoln, K. D.
(2002). Advances in the measurement of religiosity among older
African Americans: Implications for health and mental health
researchers. In J. H. Skinner & J. A. Teresi (Eds.),
Multicultural measurement in older
populations (pp. 199–220). New York: Springer.
-
Pargament, K. I., Koenig, H. G., & Perez, L. M.
(2000). The many methods of religious coping: Development and
initial validation of the RCOPE.
Journal of Clinical Psychology,
56, 519–543.
-
Paloutzian, R. F., & Ellison, C. W. (1982).
Loneliness, spiritual well-being, and quality of life. In L. A.
Peplau & D. Perlman (Eds.),
Loneliness: A sourcebook of current theory, research and therapy
(pp. 224–236). New York: Wiley.
-
Hill, P. C., & Pargament, K. I. (2003). Advances in
the conceptualization and measurement of religion and spirituality.
American Psychologist,
58, 64–74.
-
Taves, A. (2016). [Methods Series] On the virtues of
a meaning systems framework for studying nonreligious and religious
worldviews in the context of everyday life. URL:
https://nsrn.net/tag/the-meaning-systems-framework/#_ednref25
[Дата обращения 01.12.2017]
-
Davie, G. (2002). Europe: The exceptional case.
Parameters of faith in the modern world. London: Darton, Longman and
Todd.
-
Hervieu-Léger, D. (2006). In search of certainties:
The paradoxes of religiosity in societies of high modernity.
The Hedgehog Review, 8(1-2),
59–68.
-
Wuthnow R. (2007). America and the Challenges of
Religious Diversity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
-
Двойнин, A. M., Данилова, Г. И. (2012).
Психологическое исследование религиозности современной православной
молодежи. Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного
университета. (Серия IV. Педагогика. Психология), 25(2), 131–137.
-
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978).
Mind in Society. The Development of
Higher Psychological Processes. Edited by M.
Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner & E. Souberman. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
-
Leontiev, D. A. (2005). Three Facets of Meaning.
Journal of Russian and East European
Psychology, 43(6), 45–72.
|