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This is the fourth edition of the Manual for Faith Development Research. Since the first edition in 1986, the aim of the Manual has always been assisting researchers in faith development research and warrant methodological consistency in the community of faith development researchers. While the second edition was slightly revised and expanded reacting to the growing dissertations and research projects worldwide and trying to keep faith development research up-to-date with current discussions in the field such as the feminist critique of faith development theory, in the third edition of the Manual, more decisive revisions were implemented such as the restructuring of the coding criteria along the different aspects of faith. The intent of this change was opening the research perspective for the differences between the aspects of faith, thereby accounting for obviously uneven distribution of stage assignments that were found in empirical research.
Now, the fourth, considerably revised edition of the Manual pays tribute to new conceptual and empirical developments in the fields of developmental psychology and psychology of religion. From a life span perspective, development is conceptualized in multidimensional and multidirectional models, rather than as a sequence of predefined stages. Consideration of the religious styles perspective is growing, and thus the semantics of "stages" and "faith" may appear antiquated and has been updated. These and other current challenges are addressed and responded to in this fourth edition of the Manual, which builds upon the experience of two decades of faith development evaluation at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (U.S.A.) and Bielefeld University (Germany).
