Spiritual Transformation During the College Years

Dr. Hall and his research team recently completed a four-year longitudinal study of spiritual transformation at Biola University, funded by grants from the Metanexus Foundation and Biola’s assessment office. We used both qualitative and quantitative measures in this study, one of the largest longitudinal studies to be conducted on Christian college students.

We started with approximately 500 freshmen and followed them every semester with 40 self-report measures of spirituality and attachment. With a subset of 80 students, we conducted two in depth interviews of attachment and spirituality, the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), and the Spiritual Experiences Interview (SEIn). We conducted the SEIn once per year and the AAI freshman year only.

Our goal is to identify patterns of change over time during the college years and to identify themes from the interviews that shed light on the spiritual transformation process during this crucial time in the emerging adult stage of life.

Data analysis is currently underway on this project, however, preliminary results are in and reported in a recent article Dr. Hall wrote for the Biola Magazine in November, 2010, called Spirituality at a Crossroads.