This paper shows how corpus methods can be usefully employed in the field of psychology of religion in triangulation with other empirical instruments. Current international surveys mirror an on-going transformation in subjective meanings in religious discourse cumulating in the question: what do people actually mean when they describe themselves as spiritual, religious or neither? The paper presents results of a cross-cultural study with 1,886 participants in the US and Germany. The thematic goal is to explore subjective understandings by examining personal definitions of religion and spirituality. Methodologically, the study shows how the key word procedure can be used to compare the semantic profile of subjective concepts between different languages and cultures by contrasting them to standard language and by using socio-biographical context variables to build contrasting sub-corpora. To control the in-equivalence of existing reference corpora in terms of size and design a so-called reference control corpus (RCC) is introduced.
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2023. The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE): Evidence of validity in the United States and India. PLOS ONE 18:7 ► pp. e0287780 ff.
Altmeyer, Stefan & Daniel Dreesmann
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Streib, Heinz, Constantin Klein, Barbara Keller & Ralph Hood
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2020. Die dunkle Seite der Macht. cultura & psyché 1:1-2 ► pp. 145 ff.
Demmrich, Sarah & Stefan Huber
2019. Multidimensionality of Spirituality: A Qualitative Study among Secular Individuals. Religions 10:11 ► pp. 613 ff.
Dente, Claire L.
2018. Religion and Spirituality. In Social Work Practice with LGBTQIA Populations, ► pp. 236 ff.
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Schrauf, Robert W.
2018. Mixed Methods Designs for Making Cross-Cultural Comparisons. Journal of Mixed Methods Research 12:4 ► pp. 477 ff.
Altmeyer, Stefan & Constantin Klein
2016. “Spirituality” and “Religion”—Corpus Analysis of Subjective Definitions in the Questionnaire. In Semantics and Psychology of Spirituality, ► pp. 105 ff.
Mahlberg, Michaela, Peter Stockwell, Johan de Joode, Catherine Smith & Matthew Brook O'Donnell
2016. CLiC Dickens: novel uses of concordances for the integration of corpus stylistics and cognitive poetics. Corpora 11:3 ► pp. 433 ff.
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