Heinz Streib
Biographic Data
| ID | 3464505 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Heinz Streib |
| GIVEN NAMES | Heinz |
| FAMILY NAME | Streib |
| SIGNATURE | STREIB H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bielefeld University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3633-4785 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 26 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Characteristics, Predictors and Outcomes of Religious Deconversion
Chen ZJ, Streib H. Characteristics, predictors and outcomes of religious deconversion: A cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion . Submitted
Faith in Development
How has faith developed in the US and German societies across the last decades? In a three-wave longitudinal investigation of faith development, this study presents the changes of worldview and meaning-making that people associate with their religious, spiritual, agnostic and atheist identifications. For almost two decades, research teams in Chattanooga (USA) and Bielefeld (Germany) have invited and re-invited hundreds of people to participate in…
Xenocentric responsiveness
This article presents responses to the 13 commentaries of colleagues to my text “Wisdom and the Other” that is published as target article in this special issue. My response deals with three questions that have been addressed throughout several commentaries: 1. What is the contribution of xenocentric responsiveness to wisdom research, does xenocentric responsiveness aspire to constitute a new model of wisdom? 2. What happens with xenocentric resp…
Wisdom and the Other
This text networks contributions from three disciplines: phenomenological-philosophical perspectives on the Other, current discussions in wisdom research, and developmental models of social perspective-taking. The common theme is the concept of the “other,” which is ambivalent, because, on the one hand, it may produce othering that can be the entry point into vicious circles of xenophobia, hate, and annihilation, but the Other may be the source o…
Attitudes toward refugees between group-focused enmity and other-oriented responsiveness
What are the differences in attitudes toward incoming people who seek refuge from war and toward those who supposedly are coming because of the better living conditions? How could this attitudinal difference be explained? This article presents spotlights on the attitudes toward refugees in Germany based on national representative surveys in two periods, when the German borders were crossed (a) by high numbers of people fleeing the war in Syria in…
Faith development as change in religious types
Faith, as a way of how people understand God and the world and make or discover meaning in their life, is characterized by individual differences and changes over the lifetime. Our research investigates these changes over the life span in terms of hierarchically ordered types that are the elements in our developmental model, which is a critical advancement and modification of Fowler’s theory of faith development. This study is the first to invest…
Introduction to Special Issue in Honor of Ralph W. Hood, Jr
Williamson WP, Silver CF, Streib H. Introduction to Special Issue in Honor of Ralph W. Hood, Jr. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion . 2021;31(3):153-155
Evidence for the Brief Mysticism Scale
How are mystical experiences related to self-rated spirituality? Is the recently developed short 8-item version of Hood’s Mysticism Scale an efficient measurement? The current study expands evidence for both questions using N = 1,582 American and N = 1,492 German samples measured in three waves, average 4 to 5 years apart. Results show that the 8-item brief M-Scale has good psychometric property evidenced by 1) measurement invariance across time,…
Categorizing People by Their Preference for Religious Styles
This article presents a typology that categorizes people according to their profile of religious styles which concerns, among other things, the sources where they derive validity and stability, when confronted with religious and existential questions or inter-religious challenges. The modeling of this typology is an empirical complement to Streib’s model of religious styles which, in turn, is a critical advancement of Fowler’s faith development t…
Xenosophia and Religion. Biographical and Statistical Paths for a Culture of Welcome
An introduction to atheism, agnosticism, and nonreligious worldviews
Good Dog, Bad Dog
Subjective definitions of spirituality and religion
This paper shows how corpus methods can be usefully employed in the field of psychology of religion in triangulation with other empirical instruments. Current international surveys mirror an on-going transformation in subjective meanings in religious discourse cumulating in the question: what do people actually mean when they describe themselves as spiritual, religious or neither? The paper presents results of a cross-cultural study with 1,886 pa…
Faith Development, Religious Styles and Biographical Narratives
Narrative study of religious lives has formed part of numerous projects at the Bielefeld Research Center for Biographical Studies in Contemporary Religion. An essential instrument in our designs, which mostly combine qualitative and quantitative methods, is the Faith Development Interview (FDI). In response to longstanding criticism its cognitive structural framework has been revised in respect of styles and schemata. The religious styles perspec…
The Semantics of ‘Spirituality’ and Related Self-Identifications
Culturally different connotations of basic concepts challenge the comparative study of religion. Do persons in Germany or in the United States refer to the same concepts when talking about ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’? Does it make a difference how they identify themselves? The Bielefeld-Chattanooga Cross-Cultural Study on ‘Spirituality’ includes a semantic differential approach for the comparison of self-identified “neither religious nor spirit…
Religious Styles Predict Interreligious Prejudice
Based on a sample of 340 German adolescents age 12 to 25, this article presents an analysis of the effects of religion on two instances of interreligious prejudice: anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic prejudice. Reflecting the emergent interest in implementing a perspective of religious maturity and religious development into research on religion and prejudice, the present study has included the Religious Schema Scale (RSS) which, with its three subsca…
Modeling the Religious Field
Mapping the religious field of present-day Western cultures such as America and Europe requires a synopsis of perspectives. There are, on the one hand, classical ways of defining religion in theology, sociology and psychology, and also established sociological models of the religious field; and there are, on the other hand, recent changes in how people on the street implicitly and explicitly understand themselves and behave. Many are reluctant to…
"Spirituality" as Privatized Experience-Oriented Religion
Recent empirical studies demonstrate that a growing number of people contrast “spirituality” and “religion,” self-identifying as “spiritual, but not religious” or as “more spiritual than religious.” This shift in everyday semantic preference, from “religion” to “spirituality,” has also affected the terminology of the scientific study of religion, producing some uncertainty and ambivalence regarding the conceptualization of spirituality. This is c…
The Religious Schema Scale
This article presents the Religious Schema Scale (RSS). Its conceptual background is the model of religious styles. After a conceptual discussion of the relation between religious styles and religious schemata, the steps of scale construction are reported. Based on 822 responses from research participants in the United States and Germany to a preliminary 78-item version, we used construct-oriented iterative and factor-analytic procedures for redu…
Deconversion
Streib H, Hood RW, Keller B, Csöff R-M, Silver CF. Deconversion: qualitative and quantitative results from cross-cultural research in Germany and the United States of America . Research in contemporary religion. Vol 5. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht; 2009.
Religion Inside and Outside Traditional Institutions
Religion inside and outside Traditional Institutions
Changes in the religious landscape present challenges to conceptualization, methodology and empirical research of religion. The volume, Religion inside and outside Traditional Institutions, which includes contributions to the 2nd conference of the International Society for Empirical Research in Theology (ISERT) in Bielefeld, Germany, responds to these contemporary challenges. While the concept of religious praxis is their common theme, they inclu…
The Distinction between Authoritarianism and Fundamentalism in three Cultures
The goals of the study were to examine whether fundamentalism and authoritarianism could be distinguished by the Big Five factors of personality in American, Romanian and German samples, and to determine whether fundamentalism and authoritarianism could be distinguished by factor analysis in any of the three cultures. The results in all three cultures indicate that fundamentalism and authoritarianism have virtually identical personality correlate…
Theory
Based on the recent proposal in this journal (Streib, 2001a) to revise James Fowler’s (1981) faith development theory, the article argues for a revision of faith develop-ment research to account not only for structural diversity, but also for narrative and content diversity. Therefore, it suggests the inclusion of content-analytical and narra-tive-analytical procedures into faith development research. The argument develops in light of a review of…
The Variety of Deconversion Experiences
This article presents an outline of historical and situational arguments which suggest a focus on deconversion, an outline of conversion research and its consequences for deconversion, and a discussion of extant empirical research on deconversion. The discussion then focuses on the conceptualization of deconversion and compiles the features from which a comprehensive concept of deconversion may emerge. The core features of the deconversion concep…
Modeling the Religious Field
Mapping the religious field of present-day Western cultures such as America and Europe requires a synopsis of perspectives. There are, on the one hand, classical ways of defining religion in theology, sociology and psychology, and also established sociological models of the religious field; and there are, on the other hand, recent changes in how people on the street implicitly and explicitly understand themselves and behave. Many are reluctant to…
Faith Development Theory Revisited
Focusing on Fowler’s (1981) faith development theory (FDT), this qrticle presents a modification of structural–developmental theory of religion. The primacy of cognitive development as motor and guideline of religious development is called into question. The new model, the typology of religious styles, is aimed at accounting more fully for the life-history- and life-world-relatedness of religion, at its principal interactive, interpersonal origin…
Religious Styles Predict Interreligious Prejudice
Based on a sample of 340 German adolescents age 12 to 25, this article presents an analysis of the effects of religion on two instances of interreligious prejudice: anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic prejudice. Reflecting the emergent interest in implementing a perspective of religious maturity and religious development into research on religion and prejudice, the present study has included the Religious Schema Scale (RSS) which, with its three subsca…
The Religious Schema Scale
This article presents the Religious Schema Scale (RSS). Its conceptual background is the model of religious styles. After a conceptual discussion of the relation between religious styles and religious schemata, the steps of scale construction are reported. Based on 822 responses from research participants in the United States and Germany to a preliminary 78-item version, we used construct-oriented iterative and factor-analytic procedures for redu…
Theory
Based on the recent proposal in this journal (Streib, 2001a) to revise James Fowler’s (1981) faith development theory, the article argues for a revision of faith develop-ment research to account not only for structural diversity, but also for narrative and content diversity. Therefore, it suggests the inclusion of content-analytical and narra-tive-analytical procedures into faith development research. The argument develops in light of a review of…
Subjective definitions of spirituality and religion
This paper shows how corpus methods can be usefully employed in the field of psychology of religion in triangulation with other empirical instruments. Current international surveys mirror an on-going transformation in subjective meanings in religious discourse cumulating in the question: what do people actually mean when they describe themselves as spiritual, religious or neither? The paper presents results of a cross-cultural study with 1,886 pa…
The Symposium on Faith Development Theory and the Modern Paradigm
Good Dog, Bad Dog
Religion als Stilfrage
The Symposium on Faith Development Theory and the Modern Paradigm
Faith Development Theory Revisited
Focusing on Fowler’s (1981) faith development theory (FDT), this qrticle presents a modification of structural–developmental theory of religion. The primacy of cognitive development as motor and guideline of religious development is called into question. The new model, the typology of religious styles, is aimed at accounting more fully for the life-history- and life-world-relatedness of religion, at its principal interactive, interpersonal origin…
The Variety of Deconversion Experiences
This article presents an outline of historical and situational arguments which suggest a focus on deconversion, an outline of conversion research and its consequences for deconversion, and a discussion of extant empirical research on deconversion. The discussion then focuses on the conceptualization of deconversion and compiles the features from which a comprehensive concept of deconversion may emerge. The core features of the deconversion concep…
Theory
Based on the recent proposal in this journal (Streib, 2001a) to revise James Fowler’s (1981) faith development theory, the article argues for a revision of faith develop-ment research to account not only for structural diversity, but also for narrative and content diversity. Therefore, it suggests the inclusion of content-analytical and narra-tive-analytical procedures into faith development research. The argument develops in light of a review of…
The Distinction between Authoritarianism and Fundamentalism in three Cultures
The goals of the study were to examine whether fundamentalism and authoritarianism could be distinguished by the Big Five factors of personality in American, Romanian and German samples, and to determine whether fundamentalism and authoritarianism could be distinguished by factor analysis in any of the three cultures. The results in all three cultures indicate that fundamentalism and authoritarianism have virtually identical personality correlate…
Religion Inside and Outside Traditional Institutions
Religion inside and outside Traditional Institutions
Changes in the religious landscape present challenges to conceptualization, methodology and empirical research of religion. The volume, Religion inside and outside Traditional Institutions, which includes contributions to the 2nd conference of the International Society for Empirical Research in Theology (ISERT) in Bielefeld, Germany, responds to these contemporary challenges. While the concept of religious praxis is their common theme, they inclu…
Deconversion
Streib H, Hood RW, Keller B, Csöff R-M, Silver CF. Deconversion: qualitative and quantitative results from cross-cultural research in Germany and the United States of America . Research in contemporary religion. Vol 5. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht; 2009.
The Religious Schema Scale
This article presents the Religious Schema Scale (RSS). Its conceptual background is the model of religious styles. After a conceptual discussion of the relation between religious styles and religious schemata, the steps of scale construction are reported. Based on 822 responses from research participants in the United States and Germany to a preliminary 78-item version, we used construct-oriented iterative and factor-analytic procedures for redu…
"Spirituality" as Privatized Experience-Oriented Religion
Recent empirical studies demonstrate that a growing number of people contrast “spirituality” and “religion,” self-identifying as “spiritual, but not religious” or as “more spiritual than religious.” This shift in everyday semantic preference, from “religion” to “spirituality,” has also affected the terminology of the scientific study of religion, producing some uncertainty and ambivalence regarding the conceptualization of spirituality. This is c…
Faith Development, Religious Styles and Biographical Narratives
Narrative study of religious lives has formed part of numerous projects at the Bielefeld Research Center for Biographical Studies in Contemporary Religion. An essential instrument in our designs, which mostly combine qualitative and quantitative methods, is the Faith Development Interview (FDI). In response to longstanding criticism its cognitive structural framework has been revised in respect of styles and schemata. The religious styles perspec…
The Semantics of ‘Spirituality’ and Related Self-Identifications
Culturally different connotations of basic concepts challenge the comparative study of religion. Do persons in Germany or in the United States refer to the same concepts when talking about ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’? Does it make a difference how they identify themselves? The Bielefeld-Chattanooga Cross-Cultural Study on ‘Spirituality’ includes a semantic differential approach for the comparison of self-identified “neither religious nor spirit…
Religious Styles Predict Interreligious Prejudice
Based on a sample of 340 German adolescents age 12 to 25, this article presents an analysis of the effects of religion on two instances of interreligious prejudice: anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic prejudice. Reflecting the emergent interest in implementing a perspective of religious maturity and religious development into research on religion and prejudice, the present study has included the Religious Schema Scale (RSS) which, with its three subsca…
Modeling the Religious Field
Mapping the religious field of present-day Western cultures such as America and Europe requires a synopsis of perspectives. There are, on the one hand, classical ways of defining religion in theology, sociology and psychology, and also established sociological models of the religious field; and there are, on the other hand, recent changes in how people on the street implicitly and explicitly understand themselves and behave. Many are reluctant to…
Subjective definitions of spirituality and religion
This paper shows how corpus methods can be usefully employed in the field of psychology of religion in triangulation with other empirical instruments. Current international surveys mirror an on-going transformation in subjective meanings in religious discourse cumulating in the question: what do people actually mean when they describe themselves as spiritual, religious or neither? The paper presents results of a cross-cultural study with 1,886 pa…
Good Dog, Bad Dog
Xenosophia and Religion. Biographical and Statistical Paths for a Culture of Welcome
An introduction to atheism, agnosticism, and nonreligious worldviews
Categorizing People by Their Preference for Religious Styles
This article presents a typology that categorizes people according to their profile of religious styles which concerns, among other things, the sources where they derive validity and stability, when confronted with religious and existential questions or inter-religious challenges. The modeling of this typology is an empirical complement to Streib’s model of religious styles which, in turn, is a critical advancement of Fowler’s faith development t…
Introduction to Special Issue in Honor of Ralph W. Hood, Jr
Williamson WP, Silver CF, Streib H. Introduction to Special Issue in Honor of Ralph W. Hood, Jr. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion . 2021;31(3):153-155
Evidence for the Brief Mysticism Scale
How are mystical experiences related to self-rated spirituality? Is the recently developed short 8-item version of Hood’s Mysticism Scale an efficient measurement? The current study expands evidence for both questions using N = 1,582 American and N = 1,492 German samples measured in three waves, average 4 to 5 years apart. Results show that the 8-item brief M-Scale has good psychometric property evidenced by 1) measurement invariance across time,…
Faith development as change in religious types
Faith, as a way of how people understand God and the world and make or discover meaning in their life, is characterized by individual differences and changes over the lifetime. Our research investigates these changes over the life span in terms of hierarchically ordered types that are the elements in our developmental model, which is a critical advancement and modification of Fowler’s theory of faith development. This study is the first to invest…
Faith in Development
How has faith developed in the US and German societies across the last decades? In a three-wave longitudinal investigation of faith development, this study presents the changes of worldview and meaning-making that people associate with their religious, spiritual, agnostic and atheist identifications. For almost two decades, research teams in Chattanooga (USA) and Bielefeld (Germany) have invited and re-invited hundreds of people to participate in…
Xenocentric responsiveness
This article presents responses to the 13 commentaries of colleagues to my text “Wisdom and the Other” that is published as target article in this special issue. My response deals with three questions that have been addressed throughout several commentaries: 1. What is the contribution of xenocentric responsiveness to wisdom research, does xenocentric responsiveness aspire to constitute a new model of wisdom? 2. What happens with xenocentric resp…
Psychology (22 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (18 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works)