This open access volume features a data-rich portrait of what young adults think about the world. It collects the views of students in higher education from various cultural regions, religious traditions, linguistic groups, and political systems. This will help readers better understand a generation that will soon rise to power and influence.
The analysis focuses on 12 countries. These include Canada, China, Finland, Ghana, India, Israel, Peru, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, and the USA. It employs a mixed-methods approach, invested in the study of an individual's views and values using state-of-the-art methodology, including the innovative Faith Q-sort. This instrument is new to the field and developed for assessing the entanglement of subjective views and personal beliefs. The study also incorporates a comprehensive values survey as well as other survey tools that look into people's social capital, media use, social values alignment, and subjective well-being.
Each chapter is co-authored by an international team of scholars with research interest in the particular topic. The rationale for this principle is the need to engage individuals from different cultural backgrounds, scholarly disciplines, and methodological and substantive competences. In the end, this innovative approach presents an informed, empirically grounded analysis of the values and worldviews of the future generation. It sheds an important light on how changes in the religious landscape are intertwined with broad and diffuse processes of socio-economic and global cultural change.
Author Biography:
Dr. Peter Nynäs is Professor of Comparative Religion at Åbo Akademi Uni., head of department, and the director of the CoER Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective (2015–18). He directed the preceding CoER Post-Secular Culture and a Changing Religious Landscape in Finland (2010–14) and several other projects funded by Academy of Finland the ÅAU Foundation and other sources. He is the co-editor of On the Outskirts of “the Church”: Diversities, Fluidities and New Spaces of Religion in Finland (with R. Illman and T. Martikainen, LIT-Verlag, 2015) and Religion, Gender and Sexuality in Everyday Life (with A. Yip, Ashgate 2012). His main research interests are religious change, psychology of religion, religion, sexuality and gender, religion and space, and methodology in the study of religion. He is also Honorary Research Fellow at Mary Seacole Research Centre, Faculty of Health & Life Sciences at De Montfort University (UK).
Ariela Keysar, Ph.D., is Senior Fellow at the Public Values and Law Program and was the Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. A demographer, she specializes in survey methodology. She is co-principal investigator, The Class of 1995/5755: The Longitudinal Study of Young American and Canadian Jews, 1995-2019; and U.S. principal investigator, Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective, YARG, 2015-2018. She was co-principal investigator of the Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students 2014, the ARIS 2013 National College Student Survey, and the American Religious Identification Survey 2008.
Janne Kontala, PhD, worked as a researcher in Turku, Finland in the Department Study of Religions at Åbo Akademi University Centre of Excellence in Research: Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective Project (2015–2018). He specializes in the field of studies of secularism and is the author of Emerging Non-religious Worldview Prototypes: A Faith Q-sort-study on Finnish Group-affiliates (2016). He previously worked as a researcher in a project titled “Viewpoints to the world: Prototypes of worldview and their relation to motivational values in different social movements,” funded by the Academy of Finland (2011-2015)."
Dr. Ben-Willie Kwaku Golo holds a doctorate in ecological theological ethics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Ghana. His research areas include religion and society; religion and ecology; ecological and social ethics; African neo-Pentecostal theology; and contemporary developments in African Christianity and African Christian theological thought.
Dr. Mika T. Lassander is senior researcherat the Åbo Akademi University CoER Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective (2015-18) and in several preceding projects funded by the Academy of Finland such as the Viewpoints to the World –project (2011-15). His expertise, interests and publications deal with mixed-methods methodology, values, worldviews, and Actor-Network Theory. He is the author of Post-Materialist Religion: Pagan Identities and Value Change in Modern Europe (Bloomsbury, 2014) and co-editor of Post-Secular Society (with P. Nynäs and T. Utriainen, Transaction, 2012). He is also working as consultant on methodology for projects at Stanford University, Uni. of Lancaster, and Portland State Uni.
Dr. Marat Shterin is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Religion at King's College London. He holds a PhD in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science and has published extensively on religion, society, and politics in Russia. He is currently completing his monograph Religion in the Remaking of Russia (Hurst & Co and Oxford University Press).
Dr. Sofia Sjö is a senior researcher at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland. Her areas of expertize are religion and film, digital religion, and religion and gender. Her research has been published in a number of journals and edited volumes, among others Journal of Religion and Film, Journal of Contemporary Religion, Religion and Gender, Reconfigurations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Religion in a Post-Secular Society and Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives.
Dr. Paul Stenner is Professor of Social Psychology at the Open University where Co-Directs the Open Psychology Research Centre. He is known internationally as a major figure in the development of critical and theoretical psychology. He isone of Europe’s leading experts in Q methodology and qualitative methods. His work has a strong inter- and transdisciplinary focus engaging with social sciences, humanities and natural sciences.
