February 8, 2024 | San Diego, USA
Dr. Shoko Watanabe presented a research poster at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s (SPSP) Pre-Conference on Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. The poster describes preliminary findings from the 2023-2024 cross-training residential workshop.
Abstract
To encourage interdisciplinary collaborations among psychology and theology—two fields that often speak past each other albeit having shared topics of inquiry—a 16-month cross-training fellowship program was designed. This work reports findings from the initial 2-week residential workshop, in which 15 Christian theologian fellows interacted with 10 mentors to learn methodological skills needed to carry out their own psychologically informed research. Results of the pre- and post-workshop surveys showed that the fellows’ confidence to engage with psychology generally increased after the workshop. Moreover, although the fellows and mentors themselves perceived “little” to “some” tension between the disciplines of psychology and theology, they reported that such tension might be greater for theologians in general and greater still for psychologists in general. In addition, from the two focus group discussions conducted on Day 1 of the workshop, we identified several challenges of crossing interdisciplinary barriers, providing insights for future work to examine whether these concerns might be specific to synthesizing theology with psychology or social sciences more broadly.
