In the Course of a Lifetime: Tracing Religious Belief, Practice, and Change

Preface

xi Preface Many social scientists are indebted to people who are so generous of spirit that they willingly sit down and talk to interviewers, answering their intrusive and probing questions about all kinds of things going on in their lives. Our debt must be larger than most. The data we use in this book came from a longitudinal study of men and women born in Northern California in the 1920s; they were interviewed intensively in childhood and adolescence and four times in adulthood: in 1958, 1970, and 1982, and at the end of the 1990s. Again and again, these individuals , who came from a mix of social backgrounds, opened up their lives so that psychologists and sociologists might learn something about the human condition and how the interplay among the self, social relationships , and the American cultural context shapes people’s experiences and life outcomes. We are deeply indebted to all the participants, and especially to the 184 individuals most recently interviewed in late adulthood, between 1997 and 2000. We are grateful to them for their remarkable commitment to participating in the study throughout their lives. Our debt to the study participants, though enormous, does not end with them, but extends to include their parents, many of whom were interviewed when the study participants were adolescents, and to the participants’ spouses, who were interviewed at various times over the decades. xii PREFACE A long-term longitudinal study such as this is also clearly dependent on successive generations of researchers. We are extremely fortunate that, long before we were born, researchers at the Institute of Human Development (IHD) at the University of California, Berkeley, initiated this study in 1928, though at the time they did not intend it to go beyond six years! The remarkable legacy of the study’s formative figures, most especially Jean Macfarlane, Marjorie Honzik, Harold and Mary Jones, and Judith Chaffey, clearly lives on; the legacy was sustained by countless researchers and interviewers who worked at the institute over the years and whose data gathering, analyses, and publications were supported by several federal and private foundations. Although both of us received our PhDs at Berkeley, Dillon in sociology and Wink in personality psychology, neither of us had worked on the study while we were students there in the late 1980s. The study came to a pause for several years in the 1990s, until, quite serendipitously, Wink had the opportunity to reinitiate the study in 1997 when he received a grant from the Open Society Institute (the Soros Foundation). Over dinner one fall evening in 1995, while we were both on sabbatical in Berkeley, Jack Block and Gail Roberts encouraged Wink to embark on the IHD project. We are most appreciative of Carole Huffine’s support of the late adulthood interviews and in facilitating our access to the IHD archives. With the permission of the study participants, Carole, who was in charge of the IHD archives, made their names and addresses available to Wink. This set in motion the first steps in contacting them and setting up personal face-to-face interviews, almost all of which were conducted by Wink and by Pamela Bradley, a personality psychologist and research archivist at the IHD. We are most grateful for Pamela’s gentle style and probing empathy as an interviewer and for the rigorous attention to detail with which she maintains the IHD archives. We also thank Lillian Cartwright for interviewing some of the participants. The IHD director, Philip Cowan, has also been remarkably accommodating during Wink’s several visits to the archives. We also thank the Henry Murray Center at Radcliffe College for making available to us the computerized portion of the IHD archives, and are especially indebted to Jackie James, who facilitated our access to the archives. Our research using these data has been generously funded by many organizations. After the initial grant to Wink from the Open Society Institute, our collaborative research and writing were supported by grants from the Louisville Institute and the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love (part of the Fetzer Institute’s initiative, Scientific PREFACE xiii Research on Altruistic Love and Compassionate Love), and by small grants to Dillon from the Fichter Fund of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and to Wink from Wellesley College faculty and Brachman-Hoffman research awards. We are particularly grateful to the John Templeton Foundation, which gave us generous support for the...