A cross-cultural study of pre-adolescents moral, religious and spiritual questions

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1 CBRE fm Page 207 Monday, May 2, :34 PM British Journal of Religious Education Vol. 27, No. 3, September 2005, pp A cross-cultural study of pre-adolescents moral, religious and spiritual questions Kirsi Tirri a, Mary K. Tallent-Runnels b and Petri Nokelainen c * a University of Helsinki, Finland; b Texas Tech University, USA; c University of Tampere, Finland Taylor CBRE sgm / British Original Christian September PetriNokelainen Research +358 petri.nokelainen@uta.fi 40 and Journal 557 Article Centre Education (print)/ Francis 4994 of for Religious Ltd Vocational (online) EducationUniversity of TampereP.O. Box HämeenlinnaFinland This study investigated differences across four countries in the amount and nature of above-average ability and average-ability pre-adolescents everyday life, scientific, moral, spiritual and religious questions. The participants (N = 975) of this study were fifth-and sixth-grade elementary school students from different schools in Finland (N = 367), the USA (N = 164), Hong Kong (N = 169) and Bahrain (N = 275). Approximately half of the students in each country came from special programmes or schools serving above-average-ability students. The results showed that above-average-ability students from each participating country asked more scientific and moral questions than their average-ability peers. This finding was not found to be gender-related. Furthermore, in each country the average-ability students asked more everyday life questions than their gifted peers. The Christian influence in the Finnish and US data, and Muslim influence in the Bahrain data were seen in the spiritual and religious questions asked by pre-adolescents. Additionally, in all the data sets girls asked more spiritual and religious questions than boys. The results point to the need for teachers to discuss moral, religious and spiritual questions influencing pre-adolescents futures. AQ1 Keywords: Introduction Questions about morality, spirituality and religion always reflect the philosophical and religious traditions of the culture. Furthermore, educational systems in different countries vary in the moral and religious education provided for the students. This cross-cultural study involves pre-adolescents from four countries, namely Finland, the USA, Hong Kong and Bahrain. Half of the participants in each country come *Corresponding author. Research Centre for Vocational Education, University of Tampere, PO Box 229, Hämeenlinna, Finland. petri.nokelainen@uta.fi ISSN (print)/issn (online)/05/ Christian Education DOI: /

2 CBRE fm Page 208 Monday, May 2, :34 PM 208 K. Tirri et al. from special programmes or schools that served students of above-average ability and the other half come from ordinary schools representing students of average ability. We have chosen Finland to represent a European country with a very homogenous Lutheran tradition and religious education in public schools to support this tradition. The USA and Hong Kong represent countries with no religious education in public schools. However, the philosophical and religious traditions of these countries are very different, and the differences are reflected in the moral and spiritual education in schools. Bahrain represents an Arabic culture with a strong Muslim tradition. This tradition is reflected in the everyday life in schools and presumably in the questions asked by students. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there are differences across countries in the amount and nature of pre-adolescents moral, spiritual and religious questions. Our hypothesis is that scientific and every-day life questions are less culture-dependent than moral, spiritual and religious ones. In addition to culture, we investigate the effects of gender and academic giftedness on the nature of moral, spiritual and religious questions asked by pre-adolescents. Theoretical framework In many countries all over the world, the school curriculum is one that promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of students. Furthermore, education should prepare students for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life (School Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 1996; Best, 2000). For example, in Finland the goal of elementary education is to support the development of the whole person, rather than merely the cognitive domain (Framework Curriculum for Elementary School, 1994). This kind of education acknowledges the importance of social and affective domains in students development including their spiritual and religious concerns. The nature and relationships of spiritual and religious education have been very much debated in the educational international journals (Blake, 1996; Lewis, 2000). According to Carr (1995), the easiest solution to the problem of the curricular accommodation of spiritual development is to view spiritual education as simply one aspect or dimension of the general business of religious education. The problem with this approach, however, is that spiritual development would be available only to those who belong to, and participate in, some form or other of religious faith. Furthermore, the school curriculum has many other subjects besides religious education with considerable potential for the development of spiritual qualities art, history, literature, the study of nature and mathematics (Carr, 1995). According to Lewis (2000), the child brings with her or him a spiritual aspect or sensibility. The school may wish to develop and enrich this sensibility, or it may wish to ignore it. Ignorance of spirituality will still lead to learning in this area, for instance that this aspect of one s being is unimportant or inferior to purely cognitive ways of understanding (Lewis, 2000). According to Hay (1998), in a secularised society, children learn not to discuss spiritual issues openly. However, many researchers view spiritual awareness as a universal human attribute. Robert Coles (1990) has had numerous conversations with children from different countries and

3 CBRE fm Page 209 Monday, May 2, :34 PM Pre-adolescents moral, religious and spiritual questions 209 cultural backgrounds, and he thinks it is a mistake to give priority to intellectual operations in our attempts to understand children s spirituality. According to Hay (1998), spirituality can be defined as awareness that there is something greater than the course of everyday events. In children s lives, things such as birth, death, sadness, love, joy and special occasions are related to this definition. Furthermore, activities such as painting, drawing, sorting, matching, playing, storytelling and singing can give room to spiritual awareness (Hay, 1998). Lewis (2000) defines spiritual education as the cultivation of important qualities of the heart and the mind. This task is not seen as the preserve of religious education, moral education, the arts or any other area of the curriculum in isolation. The meanings given to the concepts of religion and spirituality have evolved over the centuries. William James (2003, p. 32) defined religion as the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude. Since the time of James, few psychologists have taken a serious look at religious institutions and the roles they play in shaping character. Today some writers use the terms religion and spirituality interchangeably to add linguistic variety to their terminology. However, many researchers define spirituality in contrast to religion. In these definitions religion is usually defined as the organisational, the ritual and the ideological. The spiritual then refers to the personal, the affective, the experiential and the thoughtful. The reminder that an individual can be spiritual without being religious, or religious without being spiritual, has become a standard part of many papers on spirituality (Pargament, 1999). It seems clear that spirituality must be seen as a wider concept than religion. This kind of understanding of these concepts indicates that religion and spirituality share some common areas but they also have their own areas of interests (Stifoss-Hanssen, 1999). The pre-adolescents are searching for meaning and a sense of identity. They are looking for answers from sciences and humanities. Some of the questions related to identity formation include religious and spiritual aspects. We need education that provides answers to the questions such as: Who am I? Where do I belong? What is my purpose? To whom or with what am I connected or responsible? Data and methods The participants (N = 975) in this study were from Finland (N = 367), the USA (N = 164), Hong Kong (N = 169) and Bahrain (N = 275). They were elementary school students from different schools. Approximately half of the students in each country came from special schools or programmes representing students of above-average ability and the other half came from regular schools and programmes representing students of average ability. The students of above-average ability in this sample represent general or academic giftedness as both public (Finland) and private (US, Bahrain, Hong Kong) special schools in this study have no special areas emphasised in their entrance examinations. Further, cross-cultural comparison of the level of giftedness in this sample is not possible as the difficulty level of entrance examinations varies notably. On the other side, the average-ability sample also includes pupils of belowaverage ability and pupils with educational difficulties. The participants included 55%

4 CBRE fm Page 210 Monday, May 2, :34 PM 210 K. Tirri et al. females (N = 536) and 45% males (N = 433). Participants came from elementary school grade levels 3 to 6. Their age varied between 9 and 12 years, the median was 11 years. The only gender-biased sample comes from Bahrain, as there are more female students of above-average ability (N = 99) than male (N = 35) students. The group sizes in this sample are comparable, although females (N = 270) have stronger representation than males (N =1 62) in the overall above-average-ability sample. All the students were asked to write 20 questions they would like to ask someone about the future. The same method was used earlier by Tallent-Runnels and Yarborough (1992) and Tallent-Runnels, Mullen, Tirri and Yuen (2003). Students were asked to answer the questions by their teachers during class time in spring They were given approximately 40 minutes to complete the task. The data were analysed with both quantitative and qualitative content analysis. Students questions were coded into five main categories. These categories were: scientific concerns, everyday life concerns, moral concerns, spiritual concerns, and religious concerns. The inter-rater reliability was reasonable (ir =.80). The index was based on the independent scoring of 100 students questions by two raters and an index calculated by the formula (1). n of rater agreements ir = n of questions () 1 Differences in the questions asked by students from each country were explored. Additionally, differences between boys and girls and the academically gifted students and average students were examined. ANOVA and t-test statistics were used to test the significance of differences found. The most frequently asked questions in each coding category were presented to explore the qualitative nature of students questions. Results In this study, 975 elementary school students presented a total number of 14,765 questions concerning everyday life, scientific, moral, spiritual and religious matters. Minimum frequency of questions asked was 0 and maximum was 25. Dividing the number of questions by the number of participants indicates that each student asked on average 15 questions. On the other side, continuous estimates, especially without companion of proper dispersion parameter, seldom do justice to non-normal categorical data. After calculating frequencies for the five question types for each student, a new single-column data matrix, with rows (N = 4875) containing all the question type frequencies, was created. Inspection of the frequency table showed that the most common number of questions asked was 0 (N = 2216, 45.5%), the second was 1 (N = 716, 14.7%) and the third was 2 (N = 390, 8.0%). Only 38 students out of 975 created 20 or more questions. All of them were categorised as everyday life questions. Students asked mostly everyday life questions (63%, N = 9246) and scientific questions (22%, N = 3284). The most typical question type in all four samples was

5 CBRE fm Page 211 Monday, May 2, :34 PM Pre-adolescents moral, religious and spiritual questions 211 everyday questions, varying between 79% (USA) and 54% (Finland) of all questions. Students from Finland (30%) and Hong Kong (25%) asked more scientific questions than students from Bahrain (19%) and the USA (5%). American students asked more everyday life questions (79%) than the students from the other countries (average 63%). See Table 1 for details. Students of above-average ability in each country (M = 5.6, SD = 4.5) asked more scientific questions than average-ability students (M = 1.5, SD = 2.5) [t(652) = 17.1, p =.000]. This result is not affected by gender as females were equally or overpopulated in all the above-average-ability groups in this study. Qualitative analysis revealed that the most frequently asked scientific questions in each country included medical questions such as: Will we invent a cure for cancer? and Will they find a cure for AIDS? Average-ability students in each country asked more everyday life questions than the gifted students. They asked questions such as: Will we have to go to school? or What are clothes like? The gifted students in each country (M = 1.9, SD = 2.2) asked more moral questions than average-ability students (M = 1.1, SD = 1.6). This difference was statistically significant [t(785) = 6.5, p =.000]. This finding is very much in accord with empirical results in which gifted students are shown to be more mature in their moral development than the average-ability students and very much concerned with moral questions (Narvaez, 1993; Tirri & Pehkonen, 2002). The qual- Table 1. Frequencies and percentages of scientific, everyday life, moral, spiritual and religious questions in Finnish, US, Hong Kong and Bahrain data Finland N (%) USA N (%) Hong Kong N (%) Bahrain N (%) Total N (%) Question type Scientific 1923 (58.6) 145 (4.4) 684 (20.8) 532 (16.2) 3284 (100.0) Above-average-ability 1352 (55.1) 95 (3.9) 555 (22.6) 451 (18.4) 2453 (100.0) Average-ability 558 (68.2) 50 (6.1) 129 (15.8) 81 (9.9) 818 (100.0) Everyday life 3491 (37.8) 2141 (23.2) 1662 (18.0) 1952 (21.1) 9246 (100.0) Above-average-ability 1352 (55.1) 95 (3.9) 555 (22.6) 451 (18.4) 2453 (100.0) Average-ability 558 (68.2) 50 (6.1) 129 (15.8) 81 (9.9) 818 (100.0) Moral 803 (55.8) 305 (21.2) 162 (11.3) 169 (11.7) 1439 (100.0) Above-average-ability 500 (59.6) 134 (16.0) 95 (11.3) 110 (13.1) 839 (100.0) Average-ability 302 (50.4) 171 (28.5) 67 (11.2) 59 (9.8) 599 (100.0) Spiritual 241 (41.8) 43 (7.5) 153 (26.5) 140 (24.3) 577 (100.0) Above-average-ability 108 (35.6) 23 (7.6) 86 (28.4) 86 (28.4) 303 (100.0) Average-ability 133 (48.5) 20 (7.3) 67 (24.5) 54 (19.7) 274 (100.0) Religious 64 (29.2) 73 (33.3) 43 (19.6) 39 (17.8) 219 (100.0) Above-average-ability 34 (35.8) 34 (35.8) 21 (22.1) 6 (6.3) 95 (100.0) Average-ability 30 (24.2) 39 (31.5) 22 (17.7) 33 (26.6) 124 (100.0) Total N Above-averageability Total N Average-ability Total N

6 CBRE fm Page 212 Monday, May 2, :34 PM 212 K. Tirri et al. itative analysis revealed that the majority of the moral questions asked by students dealt with war and terrorism. The most frequently asked moral questions were the following: Will there be a World War Three?, How can we avoid wars?, Will we find Osama Bin Laden? and Will we be able to defeat terrorism? Evidently, the happenings after September 11, 2001 have had an effect on the concerns of students about the future of humankind. They understand that the possibility of a war and more terrorist attacks are realistic in their own future. In this study, spiritual questions were coded to a different category than religious questions. Spiritual questions were seen as broader than religious ones and not necessarily linked to any traditional religion. The most frequently asked spiritual questions included the fundamental questions about the purpose of our lives. These were the following: What is the meaning of life? and What will I be when I grow up? Questions about life and death were also coded to this category. These were questions such as: When will the world end?, Why do people die?, What will happen to humankind?, Is there life after death? and Are you afraid of death? A typical student asked very few religious questions. More than 85% of the students did not ask any religious question. The girls (M =.25, SD =.56) asked more religious questions than the boys (M =.19, SD =.46). The difference was statistically significant [t(966) = 1.96, p =.050]. This finding is in accord with previous studies on gender differences in religiosity of adolescents. According to earlier studies (see, for example, Tamminen, 1996), girls express religiosity in different ways than boys do. Girls are shown to be more emotionally tuned and more internal than boys. This difference was found in all the age groups, in almost all the different dimensions of religiosity, and in relationship to highly varied measures (Tamminen, 1996). However, religious questions were shown to be very culture-dependent. The data from Finland and the USA included very Christian-influenced questions such as Is there a Jesus?, Does the Devil exist? and Will I go to heaven or hell? Several students were concern about the new arrival of Jesus. They asked questions like: Has a new Jesus arrived? and Will Jesus come back? These kinds of questions were missing in the Hong Kong and Bahrain data. In the Bahrain data, the most frequently asked religious question was: Do I get the chance to visit Mecca? This question reflects the dream of every Muslim to make a pilgrimage to the holy city of Muslims. The effects of multiculturalism could be seen in the question about other religions in the Finland data. During the last few years, the minority populations have grown in Finland, and Muslim children attend Finnish schools. Finnish students asked the following question about different religions: Has Islam become more popular than Christianity? Some were concerned about the status of religion in general or Christianity and they asked questions such as: Will we still have religion? and Will everyone become Christians? or Will we still know God? Discussion and conclusions In this study, gifted students from each participating country asked more scientific questions than their average-ability peers. This finding was not found to be dependent

7 CBRE fm Page 213 Monday, May 2, :34 PM Pre-adolescents moral, religious and spiritual questions 213 on the respondent s gender. Furthermore, in each country the average-ability students asked more everyday life questions than did their gifted peers. The scientific and everyday life questions were very much in accord with each other in different cultures. The gifted students in all other countries asked more moral questions than the average-ability students. The moral questions dealt with war and terrorism that reflect the global moral concerns we all have after the September 11 attack. We also found cultural differences in the spiritual and religious questions asked by pre-adolescents. In all the data sets, girls asked more spiritual and religious questions than boys. The Christian influence could be seen in the Finland and US data. The Bahrain data reflected a clear Muslim influence in the nature of religious questions. This study points to the need for teachers to discuss moral, spiritual and religious questions influencing pre-adolescents futures. This is true for gifted children inasmuch as they are interested in these topics. It is also true for average-ability students, because they did not express as much concern as they might have for topics that might affect their futures. Furthermore, spiritual and religious questions are among the issues pre-adolescents are concerned with. These questions should be addressed in every culture to help the youngsters find answers to questions such as: Who am I?, Where do I belong?, What is my purpose?, To whom or what am I connected or responsible? All the leading religious and spiritual traditions in the world have studied these questions. Our pre-adolescents need the knowledge and wisdom of these traditions in order to grow not only cognitively but spiritually as well. AQ2 Notes on contributors References Best, R. (Ed.) (2000) Education for Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Development (London, Continuum). Blake, N. (1996) Against spiritual education, Oxford Review of Education, 22 (4), Carr, D. (1995) Towards a distinctive conception of spiritual education, Oxford Review of Education, 21 (1), Coles, R. (1990) The Spiritual Life of Children (Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin Company). Framework Curriculum for Elementary School (1994) (Helsinki, National Board of Education).

8 CBRE fm Page 214 Monday, May 2, :34 PM 214 K. Tirri et al. Hay, D. (1998) The Spirit of the Child (London, Fount). James, W. (2003) The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, Signet Classic). Lewis, J. (2000) Spiritual education as the cultivation of qualities of the heart and mind. A reply to Blake and Carr, Oxford Review of Education, 26 (2), Narvaez, D. (1993) High-achieving students and moral judgment, Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 16, Pargament, K. (1999) The psychology of religion and spirituality? Yes and no. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 9 (1), School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA) (1996) Education for Adult Life: The Spiritual and Moral Development of Young People. Discussion paper No. 6 (London, SCAA). Stifoss-Hanssen, H. (1999) Religion and spirituality: what a European ear hears, The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 9 (1), Tallent-Runnels, M. K. & Yarbrough, D. (1992) Effects of the Future Problem Solving program on children s concerns about the future, Gifted Child Quarterly, 36 (4), Tallent-Runnels, M. K., Mullen, G., Tirri, K. & Yuen, M. (2003) A cross-cultural study of children s concerns about the future, paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, April. Tamminen, K. (1996) Gender differences in religiosity in children and adolescents, in: L. Francis, W. Kay & W. Campbell (Eds) Research in Religious Education (Leominster, Gracewing), Tirri, K. & Pehkonen, L. (2002) The moral reasoning and scientific argumentation of gifted adolescents, The Journal of Secondary Gifted, XIII (3),

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