CollectionPicture's code
CountryRegion
Institution typeSchool type
SexAge
Year
Exclude terms

Project


Project description

Over the last few decades the study of the concept of god (also image/representation) has become one of the main research areas of the psychology of religion. This issue has been approached from different psychological perspectives, including cognitive developmental psychology, object relations theory, cognitive psychology, attribution theory and attachment theory. The concept of god is a very complex psychological construct and many scholars have noted the limitation of its current measurement, which relied mostly on verbal measures: questionnaires, interviews, list of adjectives to describe gods, etc.

The Drawings of gods research, headed by Prof. Pierre-Yves Brandt, is a project developed in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Lausanne. The project aims to contribute to further understanding of the origin and development of the concept of god by using children’s drawings collected in different cultures and different religious traditions. Although the use of this method has been criticized, it has the potential to provide considerably more information on the way in which children conceptualize god. This more appropriate research tool offers the opportunity to undertake at the same time developmental and cross-cultural research, the lack of which has greatly limited advancements in the field.

Web-Based Database “ Drawings of gods”

The Drawings of gods Web-Based Database (ddd.unil.ch) is designed to store research data and make it available not only to scholars affiliated with the research project but also to the broader public who will be interested in this issue. The data began with 143 children’s drawings collected in 2003-2004 in Japan. Currently the database contains more than 7100 drawings collected in Japan, Romania, Russia, Switzerland, United States, Iran, Nepal, and Netherland, and it is continually growing.

In the future we expect that the database will be of interest to researchers in new countries and the database will be expanded and enriched by drawings of god from other cultures.

For further information or if you would like to participate in the research, please contact the project coordinator Professor Pierre-Yves Brandt with the contact form below.


Warning: Trying to access array offset on value of type null in /var/www/html/fonctions.php on line 625
Publications

Drawings of gods uses the framework Bootstrap (with the beautiful Glyhicons) and the libraries jQuery, PHPPowerPoint and PHPExcel. Thanks to the developers of the open software community.