PSU study to focus on students' beliefs

PSU researcher eyes link between students' majors, spiritual views

By Anne Danahy

A search for understanding of college students' spiritual and religious views will probably keep Chris Scheitle busy in the next few months.

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Scheitle, a postdoctoral research associate at Penn State, will be sifting through the responses of about 14,000 students to surveys the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles conducted in fall 2004 and spring 2007. The goal: finding if there is any relationship between what students study and changes in their religious or spiritual beliefs.

Scheitle is one of a dozen researchers whose proposals were chosen from about 67 grant proposals to receive funding. He’ll get $10,000 along with access to the data and will present his findings at a UCLA symposium in December.

“Many people assume there is a conflict between scientific knowledge and being spiritual or religious,” Scheitle said. “This study,

regardless of what we find, will be one of the better ways to get at whether that is the case.”

In particular, he’ll look at whether students studying natural sciences become less religious or spiritual than those in other fields, such as humanities and social sciences.

There have been studies of the religious views of academics, including scientists. But the findings have been mixed, Scheitle said. He said the studies have focused on traditional religious beliefs and have been of faculty.

Because this survey got responses from students as freshmen, then two years later, it will let Scheitle look at whether their views changed and whether there is any relationship between changes and what they’re studying.

Every year, the institute surveys first-year students at several hundred colleges and universities across the country. In 2004, questions on religion and spirituality were added to the survey. A follow-up survey of about 15,000 of those students was done in 2007, allowing researchers to look at whether and how students’ spiritual beliefs changed after a few years in school.

Scheitle said while researchers at the institute are doing their own work with the data, they wanted to encourage other people to write about the data as well and put out a call for proposals.

Scheitle, who earned a doctorate in sociology from Penn State in 2008, said it struck him as a good opportunity to look at religion and science.

Anne Danahy can be reached at 231-4648.