Spiritual Exemplars During the College Years

Working with doctoral students Brendon Jones and Kendra Bailey, the next phase of Dr. Hall’s research program on spiritual transformation among college students takes a close-up look at spiritually mature college students. The sample includes a group of students who were nominated by campus leaders as “spiritual exemplars” and a group of “non-exemplar” students. This is a “mixed methods” study, meaning it uses both a self-report measure (the Spiritual Transformation Inventory; STI) and an in depth interview. There are several goals for this project:

• to identify themes that uniquely characterize spiritually mature college students
• to identify spiritual themes among different attachment styles (scored using the Adult Attachment Interview coding system)
• to identify STI profiles (patterns of scores) for different attachment styles and use interview themes to further develop feedback for the STI