Owning Faith: First-Year College-Going and the Development of Students’ Self-Authored Worldview Commitments

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper was to examine the institutional conditions and educational practices associated with the development of first-year students’ capacities to script their own religious, spiritual, and worldview narratives through exposure to and thoughtful reflection on encounters with diverse others. We longitudinally administered a theoretically-derived and empirically-validated measure of interfaith learning and development to 7,194 first-year students enrolled in one of 122 institutions. In addition, we weighted data to reflect national demographic presentations for first-year students and used hierarchical linear modeling to account for students nested within institutions. Results indicated that development gains were related to institutional interfaith commitments, including the provision of opportunities for students to participate in at least two formal interfaith co-curricular experiences during the first year in college.

KEYWORDS:

• Quantitative
• spirituality
• religiosity
• diversity climate

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Based on previous empirical work in this area, we often use the term “worldview” in place of “religion” to include students whose life philosophy is non-religious in nature (e.g., atheists and agnostics; Mayhew & Bryant, 2013).

2. Specific variables are articulated in the methods section of this paper.

3. Students could not not select more than one worldview unless they indicated another worldview and provided their two or more worldviews in the write-in option.