THE DEFINITIONS PROJECT
The Definitions Project is a 15-year qualitative and quantitative research project to define the terms religiousness, spirituality, faith, and the sacred and develop and validate a Multilevel Interdisciplinary Paradigm for the psychology of religion and spirituality. The culmination of more than a decade and a half of research, we conducted content analyses of definitions taken from 820 articles, which were random samples taken from a library of 4,100 psychology of religion and spirituality peer-reviewed journal articles. We also took random samples of 600 psychology of religion book chapters, two samples of college students, a national sample of psychologists in clinical practice, and a small sample of clients in counseling. We content analyzed definitions from these sources, arguing to consensus using consensual qualitative research, and derived for each term a definition and a list of constructs related to each term. This was the largest content analysis ever conducted of these terms. We then used these definitions and constructs to construct a Multilevel Interdisciplinary Paradigm (MIP) for the field of the psychology of religion and spirituality – a unified theory for the field. We are currently testing this theory, using a Delphi Study of leaders in the field, a survey of members of the field, and a factor analysis of the MIP constructs. We have published one article in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, we will soon publish a chapter on the MIP in the book Assessing Spirituality and Religiousness in a Diversified World, and we are submitting another article for publication in the journal Spirituality in Clinical Practice.