How do people perceive their own religious, spiritual or atheist biography? This is a question that our research team has been focusing on for nearly two decades. Our developmental perspective critically, but constructively relates to Fowler’s (1981) Faith Development Theory, as described in Streib’s (2001) approach of religious styles, paying tribute to the fact that development is not, in most cases, a linear upward process. By combining Fowler’s structural evaluation method with approaches to content analyses, this paper will show the merit of these qualitative methods when looking at (religious) development in different surroundings. For that purpose, we present case studies with different cultural backgrounds. Their different trajectories and possible commonalities will be shown on a structural as well as on a content level. This approach enables us to reconstruct movement within the religious field and will show how this is displayed on a subjective, biographical level.

人们如何看待自己的宗教，精神或无神论传记？这是我们研究团队近二十年来一直关注的一个问题。我们的发展观点批判性地但建设性地与福勒（Fowler，1981）的信仰发展理论有关，正如斯特雷布（Streib，2001）的宗教风格方法所描述的那样，这是因为在大多数情况下，发展并不是线性上升的过程。通过将Fowler的结构评估方法与内容分析方法相结合，当研究不同环境中的（宗教）发展时，本文将展示这些定性方法的优点。为此，我们提供具有不同文化背景的案例研究。它们的不同轨迹和可能的共性将在结构和内容级别上显示。