A Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Audit of the American Families of Faith Project: Exploring Lifespan Spiritual Development in Religiously and Racially Diverse Families

Abstract

Social science and religious studies scholars should endeavor to broaden theories, methods, and samples to be more inclusive. Therefore, we have conducted an “equity audit” of the American Families of Faith (AFF) project. We evaluated the diversity, equity, and inclusion of the AFF project’s (a) research team, (b) products, and (c) samples. We then discuss the reasoning behind the decisions that resulted in the existing strengths and limitations of the project, the fruits of this and previous evaluations (including a presentation of some narrative accounts from parents and youths across several religious-ethnic communities across the US), opportunities for growth, and future directions for the AFF project and conclude with some thoughts on what other researchers might gain from this audit. Previous reviews have found a lack of diversity among scholars and samples in the field of psychology. Much needs to be done to create truly representative science. We subsequently conducted a diversity, equity, and inclusion audit.

1. Introduction

Abo-Zena and Rana mentioned in their call for this special issue that “religious and spiritual influences have been described as elusive”. We concur. Given the elusive nature of such influences, it is necessary for researchers to pause and reflect from time to time and re-evaluate how best to move forward. Abo-Zena and Rana have joined with other scholars in working “to center underrepresented populations, traditions, and religious or spiritual influences across traditions”. To assist in this crucial work, we have conducted an “equity audit” of our American Families of Faith (AFF) project (from 1995–2022) that provides an example of an equity inventory that may be helpful for other scholars in the field. We can see many potential benefits of such a process for us and, hopefully, for other scholars. We will do our best to honestly and rigorously evaluate how the project has addressed various forms of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We discuss what overarching lessons we have learned from our more than two decades of engagement in the scholarship at the nexus of religion and family relationships, that is, between faith and family life, and our research on the lifespan religious and spiritual development of adolescents. We hope that this article will be helpful to our colleagues, particularly our colleagues from younger generations, to assist their projects and the fields that study lifespan spiritual development.

We hope that this article will provide a model of reflexivity within our own body of scholarship that can be carried out by other labs or research groups working on their respective bodies of research. We hope that readers will find ways to connect this review “up” to the larger field of scholarship being conducted in a particular scholarly area by using a range of methods, samples, and inter- or transdisciplinary perspectives. Along these lines, Li (2003, p. 175) stated that

If research continues to be pursued independently with respect to different development contexts at these different levels, the dynamic gestalt of the open developmental system involving a series of closely linked interactions and plasticity across developmental contexts at different levels on varying time scales will not be obtainable.

We hope this article can help communicate that no matter how thorough a series of studies are, to capture human diversity and the complexity of experiences across the lifespan, we need different research teams to work within and across subfields to connect back to people being studied and the field overall.

1.1. Value and Processes of an In-Depth Inventory of One Research Project

There is great value in metascience, including meta-analyses. Meta-analyses of large numbers of empirical studies can help us assess the state of the field and suggest important new directions. But of what possible value to our fellow scholars might an in-depth analysis/inventory/audit of one, specific, unique, and perhaps singular research project be? We try to frame this inventory so that it can stimulate thoughts on the issues that can hopefully be helpful to a wide range of social scientists with diverse backgrounds and perspectives.

We hope that our candid discussion of our research decisions with their attendant costs and benefits will be useful to our colleagues who study spiritual development as well as those who study any aspect of spirituality or religion. We further hope that each reader will have distinct, meaningful thoughts and impressions relevant to their work that we could not have anticipated.

1.2. Brief Discussion of the State of the Field on Diversity

Arnett (2009) documented disproportionate representation by comparing the authors, samples, reviewers, and editorial boards of published scholarship, finding that 70% came from the United States (only 5% of the world’s population). After a decade, Arnett partnered to revisit this representation and found only minor improvements (now 60% US based), jeopardizing the quality of data-driven science. They concluded that to be truly representative of humanity, psychology has a long way to go (Thalmayer et al. 2021).

Syed et al. (2018) brought substantial data to bear to demonstrate that racial/ethnic minorities have been almost “invisible” in the field of developmental psychology as scholars, editors, research subjects, and participants. Syed et al. (2018) stated that

The historic and ongoing exclusion of research with racial/ethnic minority populations means that there are substantial gaps in our knowledge of core developmental issues. …

The gaps in developmental knowledge also consist of constructs and processes that were underexamined or overlooked entirely because of the focus on racial/ethnic majority populations.

(p. 818)

Three key questions adapted by Syed et al. (2018) on the invisibility of ethnic minorities in research included the following: the vantage points represented (by the scholars), the types of questions that have been valued, and the voices that are heard and those that are missing. Totenhagen et al. (2022) discussed eight “isms”: ageism, classism, gender/gender-based oppression, cisnormativity/cissexism, placeism/geographic location, racism/ethnicity-based oppression, heteronormativity/heterosexism, and ableism.

Roberts et al. (2020) examined 26,000 empirical articles published over 5 decades in several top-tier cognitive, developmental, and social psychology journals. They found that, “from the 1970s to the 2010s, only 5% of publications highlighted race (1511 of 26,380)” (p. 1298). They also found that, “across five decades of research, the majority of publications on race have been written by White authors, although less so over time” (p. 1301). They suggested that

If psychological science is to tackle diverse questions from diverse perspectives, it must diversify. This is not to presuppose that [persons of color (POCs)] necessarily hold worldviews that privilege POCs. Rather, in addition to benefitting from increased racial diversity, psychological science would also benefit from norms and communal agreements that center around diversity, equity, and inclusion.

(p. 1303)

Roberts et al. (2020) concluded their landmark piece by suggesting that “if we are to have a genuinely sound and equitable science, we must acknowledge the role of our finite perspectives and develop practices that ensure our science is not limited or dominated by a single one” (p. 1306). Cole (2009) posed three important questions: Who is included (and not included)? What role does inequality play? Where are the similarities—what are the commonalities across differences?

A basic model for facilitating greater equity has been provided by the equity X design team (Ortiz et al. 2016). This approach suggests a simple framing (asking who/what has been left behind and inquiring into who or what is being included and for equity reasons may be misrepresented given tendencies toward reductionism, bias, stereotypes, and other examples of erasure).

This special issue and this article are consistent with the increased attention that social science scholars have rightly given to issues around diversity, equity, and inclusion. We believe there are many important types of diversities, equities, and inclusions that are essential for social scientists to consider in their work, including ideological diversities.

1.3. Diversities among Collaborators

Diversities of ideologies and/or political perspectives can enhance and enrich a team. Likewise, “project-relevant” diversity can also significantly elevate quality (Marks 2015). For the American Families of Faith project, our focus on the nexus of faith and family life led us to actively seek out, invite, and welcome collaborators from a diverse array of faiths. Of particular interest to us were scholars from minority or marginalized religious communities, including Muslim, Jewish, and various Christian minority faiths such as Orthodox Christian, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Latter-day Saints.

One vital motivation and purpose for our research project, from the outset, has been to understand and give voice to highly religious people across diverse faiths, races, and regions. Further, three decades ago, our reading of the social science literature and the behavioral science literature revealed a recurring bias against highly religious people (see Marks and Dollahite 2017). One comment from a wise and valued colleague and friend immediately after we presented some qualitative data from highly religious people to a group of faculty and graduate students in the 1990s is indicative of the state of social science at that time. He said, “This is really interesting stuff. It is too bad that it will never be published”. Somewhat surprisingly, the data were, in fact, published via several articles and chapters in an array of outlets. We are pleased to note that in the intervening decades, many of our colleagues in the social sciences have moved beyond blatant antireligion biases.

If one vital motivation for AFF was to give highly religious people a strong voice of their own, another motivation came from a literature search in the late 1990s that revealed more than 10,000 studies on divorce, while fewer than 300 explored strong, healthy marriages in depth and in a qualitative way. We perceived an opportunity to jointly explore both highly religious families and strong, enduring marriages. How? We would ask religious leaders to refer us to the strongest marriages in their diverse faith communities and then interview those spouses.

Wise researchers agonize over their sampling. We think it also is wise to agonize over building your research “dream team” as that may be as critical as the sample. We actively sought collaborators from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds, including Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Arab researchers, as well as first-generation immigrant or international scholars from a number of nations (including but not limited to India, Ukraine, China, Japan, Chile, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia). In our experience, first-generation immigrant researchers can offer valuable etic versus emic insights, comparisons, and contrasts that are not apparent to fully “native” teams. We think it is worth spending extraordinary amounts of time and effort to find committed and open-minded scholars and students from diverse backgrounds who are interested in contributing to the project and helping guide its destiny. We believe that the desire and ability to build strong relationships across various diversities is paramount for a long-term, successful project.

In the 1990s, we thought that an in-depth, sustained, multipronged project exploring the whys and hows of marriage, parenting, and lived faith in diverse families was worthwhile to undertake and maintain. We think that repeated forays into the now more than 10,000 pages of interview data from more than 700 people from more than 300 families was worth doing. We still do. However, doing so has required the “sweat equity” of our more than 200 students and 89 coauthors. We estimate that their combined investment of time and energy amounts to a multimillion-dollar contribution.

1.4. The Present Project

We could not find a precise example or model to follow for our equity audit, so in addition to following the helpful guidelines provided by the guest editors, we did our best to consider what kinds of issues might be important and thus reviewed some recent research about the state of the field on diversity, as described above. We ultimately concluded that the aspects of the AFF project that were most applicable to undergo a diversities, equities, and inclusions audit/inventory were the project’s (a) research team, (b) products, and (c) samples. Similar future efforts by others may justifiably include other aspects, but this is a start. We next turned our attention to our method of the assessing DEI (diversities, equities, and inclusions) on the AFF research team.

2. Method

2.1. Diversities, Equities, and Inclusions Inventory of the AFF Project’s Research Team

To address the first question of Syed et al. (2018) on author vantage points, and inspired by author data reported in Totenhagen et al. (2022), we conducted a Qualtrics survey of AFF authors and interviewers that included the country of origin, the region of the United States, experience living abroad, race/ethnicity, gender identity, primary language, secondary languages, sexual identification, age, religious affiliation, field/department of highest degree, career stage, disability, marital history/status, and parenting history/status. Additionally, interviewers were asked how many of the families that they interviewed shared the same race/ethnicity and/or religion as the interviewer, as well as how many were conducted in their native language. Of the 89 authors/coauthors, 40 completed the survey (i.e., 45%), and of the 18 interviewers, 10 completed the survey (i.e., 56%). A limitation of the survey is that since than less than half of authors/coauthors completed the survey a good deal of diversity was not captured in the survey.

Further, we examined how many of the articles that focused on only one subgroup (e.g., Asian Christian families) included both in-group and out-group (or emic and etic) perspectives among the authors of that article. This combination approach of including and utilizing both “insider” and “outsider” researchers can provide more comprehensive and more nuanced views of the processes being studied. Insiders can help with understanding and interpreting distinctive aspects and features of the community. Outsiders can help make meaningful comparisons and connections with other groups, including and especially their own. The hope is that the insider can help others better understand the nuances, complexities, and diversities within their community while the outsider can help build bridges to other communities. We think this has the potential to increase empathy and respect for others while perhaps even fostering healthy “holy envy” between individuals, families, and broader communities (Marks and Dollahite 2018).

2.2. Diversities, Equities, and Inclusions Inventory of the AFF Project’s Products

Because the primary investigators (Dollahite and Marks) have worked to promote the careers of our junior colleagues and students by having as many of our publications as possible be lead-authored by them, we examined the proportion of AFF scholarly publications where Dave/Loren were secondary instead of lead authors. Further, because the primary investigators have worked to promote female voices in academia, we evaluated how many scholarly publications had at least one female author/coauthor.

We examined the diversity of disciplines/fields of the journals where peer-reviewed articles from the AFF project have been published. We also examined outreach/public scholarship efforts to educate lay audiences. Lastly, we examined to what extent and in what ways the AFF project has used an intersectional lens.

2.3. Diversities, Equities, and Inclusions Inventory of the AFF Project’s Samples

Because the AFF project is a collection of studies and samples and has never, up to this point, used one overall sample with all 300+ families, it seems most fitting to share the results of our diversity inventory across the different phases of the project. Overall, we inventory the diversity of the following variables: geography, race/ethnicity, gender, religion, class, sexual identification/marital status, parental status/history, and disability. We also briefly note differences in methodology across the developmental phases of the project.

2.4. Positionality/Reflexivity

The compilation of the data for this audit/inventory was performed by a graduate student (Hendricks) to enable a fresh and somewhat-outsider view of the project while also granting the student access to the primary investigators to provide an insider view of the project.

The primary investigators acknowledge many privileges and express their gratitude for the benefits to us of our work in the AFF project. Dollahite and Marks were fortunate to grow up in two-parent, married households where education was valued. With the assistance of scholarships, low-interest federal loans, Pell grants, and research and teaching assistantships, we were fortunate to be able to continue our education at excellent graduate institutions.

We were fortunate to have caring and devoted doctoral mentors (Kathryn Rettig for Dave; Rob Palkovitz for Loren). Over the course of the AFF project, we have been privileged to enjoy the benefits of academic employment as full-time professors at four major universities, including one (BYU) with significant internal funding for research.

We have been privileged to receive close to $200,000 in research grants over the course of this project from various institutions. We have been greatly blessed with wonderful graduate and undergraduate students that have assisted in this work. Between BYU (1995–present) and LSU (2002–2015), we have had more than 200 undergraduate students who have (for credit, pay, or experience) helped code (across dozens of specific studies) the now more than 10,000 pages of qualitative interview data. Many of the most important insights from the project had their genesis with a bright and motivated student. We have benefited by the fact that BYU strongly encourages faculty to include undergraduates in the research process, including as coauthors. This has allowed us to mentor undergrads in for-credit research practicums and for-pay research assistantships. The most committed students have been excellent coauthors on scholarly publications. In summary, in terms of mentoring received and mentoring offered, we have been profoundly benefited by individuals who were generationally before us and after us.

We have also been benefited by the generous gift of time and shared experience of the roughly 700 people who have allowed us to interview them at length. While most of these people received some token remuneration for their participation (and we would have paid more if we could have), their participation allowed us to learn from and publish their thoughts and ideas. We are confident that the diversity and size of our sample has led to greater respect than it might have if the sample were not as racially and religious diverse. We have actively tried to counter the identified tendency of empirical research of the past to focus on primarily (and often solely) White Christian samples by having most of our sample be composed of racial and ethnic minority families (Marks and Dollahite 2017).

On the basis of the hundreds of reviews we have received from journal editors and reviewers, we think it is likely that the diversity of our sample has served as a counterbalance in the eyes of some colleagues—something of an equalizer for the subject of our research (religion, traditional marriages, and families) as well as our religious and ideological differences with many journal editors and reviewers of our manuscripts. As sociologist Christian Smith has argued in his book The Sacred Project of American Sociology,

An important aspect of American sociology’s sacred project, as I mentioned above, is the desire to displace the authority of traditional, institutional religion (especially Christianity, being the most irrational and oppressive of them all) with the authority of secular, rational, empirical (social) science and secular movements for social and political justice … a particular secular sacred project to which American sociology is devoted blinded (and continues to blind) the discipline to the ongoing reality and importance of religion as a social fact of political, economic, and cultural consequence.

(pp. 150, 152)

As religious scholars at a religious university who study religious families by using qualitative methods, we are in a distinct minority as social science scholars. Thus, we are greatly indebted to our participants, especially our participants from various religious and racial/ethnic minority communities, for any success the American Families of Faith project has enjoyed. We have strived to highlight their insights and experiences above our own and to try to pass their generosity along by giving voice to them in our work. We hope our work has honored their gifts. Now, we move on to the DEI inventory of our project.

3. Results: Diversities, Equities, and Inclusions Inventory of the American Families of Faith Project

3.1. Inventory of the American Families of Faith Research Team

3.1.1. Integrating Insider (Emic) and Outsider (Etic) Perspectives

The AFF project attempts to combine the epistemological benefits of both an insider perspective (emic) and an outsider perspective (etic). Of the 31 empirical journal articles that focused on a specific religious-ethnic community (e.g., only on Muslims) rather than looking at the similarities across multiple groups, 27 (87%) included at least one researcher who was a member of the community being studied and at least one researcher who was not a member of that community.

Perhaps the scholarly product that best captures our efforts at religious and racial-ethnic diversities is reflected in our edited volume Strengths in Diverse Families of Faith: Exploring Religious Differences (Dollahite and Marks 2020), which was originally a special issue of the journal Marriage and Family Review. We introduced this volume by stating that

Despite living in Age of the Internet, with the seeming promise of increased access to information yielding increased understanding, tolerance, and civility among people, we seem to be moving the opposite direction. Sadly, we live in an era of ignorance, misunderstanding, suspicion, and hostility across racial, ethnic, religious, political, and national boundaries (Prothero 2007). We hope the articles in this [volume] can contribute toward greater understanding across at least two of those divides: religion and race/ethnicity. We hope readers come away from this special issue with a deepened appreciation and respect for those of various religious-ethnic communities.

In describing the authorship of articles in the special issue, we reported that,

Consistent with our aim to move beyond the purview of White, middle-class Christians that have dominated the samples and authorship of the past, each article in this issue features authors who are diverse in terms of race/ethnicity, religion, and gender. Specifically, each article was produced by at least two coauthors from inside the featured religious-ethnic community and by at least two coauthors from outside that community in an effort to capture and convey strengths of both emic and etic positioning (Daly 2008). Therefore, each article’s authorship reflects diversity across race/ethnicity, religion, and gender. In each article, the first two authors are graduate students, the second two are insider experts, and the last two are the co-editors.

3.1.2. Inventory of the American Families of Faith Authors/Coauthors and Interviewers

Because seven of the authors/coauthors were also interviewers, we report the combined diversity of both interviewers and authors. The majority of the research team came from the United States (i.e., 38/43, or 88%), with the remaining authors coming from Canada, India, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Ukraine. However, a little over half had lived in another country for at least 3 months (i.e., 24/43, or 56%). Members of the research team came from seven of the eight socioreligious regions of the United States (Silk and Walsh 2011), with New England being the one region not represented. English was the native language of most of the team (i.e., 40/43, or 93%); however, half spoke at least one additional language (i.e., 22/43, or 51%). Similarly, a little over half (56%) of the team were men. All members of the research team reported being cisgender. Almost all researchers reported being heterosexual (i.e., 41/43), with one identifying as lesbian and one as bisexual. The majority were married (i.e., 33/43, or 77%) and had children (29/43, or 67%). A notable minority (i.e., 8/43, or 19%) reported having a disability. The majority were White Non-Hispanic (i.e., 38/43, or 90%), with two being Black or African American, one being Arabian, one being Hispanic, and one being Asian. Most were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e., 32/43, or 74%), with four being born-again/evangelical Christian, two being Catholic, one being agnostic, one being Orthodox Christian, one being Muslim, and one being Jewish. Most were trained in family studies (i.e., 29/43, or 67%), with the remaining being trained in psychology (4/43), sociology (4/43), marriage and family therapy (2/43), social work (2/43), music (1/43), or political science (1/43). There were more students (i.e., including both graduate and undergraduate students—21/43, or 49%) than there were professors (i.e., including assistant, associate, and full professors—18/43, or 42%), with the remaining five team members coming from other careers. These interviewers conducted 170 of the over 300 interviews, leaving much to be accounted for. However, of these interviews, 82% were conducted in the preferred language of the participants, 18% were conducted by someone of the same religion, and 52% were conducted by someone of the same race/ethnicity.

3.2. Inventory of the Publications/Products of the American Families of Faith Project

In total, there are 93 articles that have been published from the AFF project in 36 journals, associated with 13 disciplines/fields (i.e., clinical psychology, developmental psychology, family studies, finance, gender studies, health, law/public policy, methods, family psychology, race, religious studies, sexuality, and sociology). Further, 37 other publications have appeared in books. Of the 130 total scholarly publications (i.e., peer-reviewed articles and chapters) that have resulted from the AFF project, 65 of them (exactly half, 50%) were lead-authored by someone other than Dave/Loren, and 62 (48%) included a female author/coauthor. These publications have been cited just shy of 4000 times by other scholars as of June 2022.

We have tried to reach out to include diverse audiences for our work. Thus far, we have published more than 40 additional articles in more than 10 online publications intended for general (rather than scholarly) audiences (including The Atlantic, First Things, Mercatornet, Public Discourse, Institute for Family Studies, and LDS Living), as well as multiple articles (in RealClearReligion, Public Square, Meridian Magazine, and Deseret News). In addition, we have created many podcasts (available on various platforms) and “audio articles” (readings of various articles) as well as an American Families of Faith YouTube channel. We have also hired an outreach director, who helps maintain an AFF presence on selected social media outlets and has created a number of brief videos (available on our American Families of Faith YouTube channel).

Intersectionality in Research Questions and Participant Representation

As mentioned previously, 31 empirical articles used data solely from a particular subgroup rather than looking at similarities across multiple groups. Further, a large majority of AFF studies have utilized a strengths-based approach, while relatively few studies have examined the difficulties of intersectional groupings.

In our publications, our typical approach of identifying each quote as from, for example, “Amy, an Asian American Christian wife” or “Robert, a Black Baptist father” or “Rachel, a Jewish teenager” is a kind of “intersectional positioning” for that statement. As we stated in Strengths in Diverse American Families of Faith (2020),

Each unique Christian, or Muslim, or Jewish denomination, or congregation, or family has its own peculiar set of beliefs and practices that express what is particularly Christian, or Muslim, or Jewish about them. And, these families have a particular way in which they live out their beliefs and practices in family life. … To try and understand religious-ethnic families without attempting to understand their particular religions, logics, ethnicities, and/or lived experience would be to devise a theory of those families that is not actually about them. Unlike quantitative methodology, religion and ethnicity are not items that can simply be “controlled” for, but are pathways to other worlds that should control (we prefer the word “influence”) the way we approach every aspect of our studies, including: (a) the questions we ask, (b) the responses we record, attend to, and report, and (c) the experiences we have and interpret as researchers. Also unlike quantitative approaches that delete outliers and compare means, this religious approach to religion relies almost exclusively on outliers or … to prototypically represent a faith community’s unique logic.

(p. 23)

3.3. Inventory of the American Families of Faith Sample

3.3.1. Phase 1: Fathers of Faith (1995–2003)

The roots of the AFF project started in 1995 with interviews with 35 fathers (Dollahite et al. 1998). All were parents of at least one child with special needs. These needs included moderate to severe physical and cognitive delays, serious chronic and terminal conditions and illnesses (e.g., leukemia), autism, Down syndrome, Tourette syndrome, blindness and deafness, heart disease, and severe scoliosis (curvature of the spine). We believe that this initial focus on including parents of children with special needs served as a great strength to the project because it sensitized us to issues around disability, ableism, and appreciating diverse approaches to addressing challenging circumstances.

However, several other types of diversity were lacking in this first phase. This included a lack of religious, racial/ethnic, gender, socioeconomic, family structure, and geographic diversity. First, regarding religious diversity, all 35 fathers identified with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Latter-day Saint). In terms of racial/ethnic diversity, 31 of the 35 fathers were White, with the remaining four being Black, Chinese, Pacific Islander, and Hispanic. Only male participants were included, given the focus on fathering processes. Most participants were well educated and were considered middle socioeconomic status. Only one of the fathers was single, following a divorce; the 34 remaining fathers were married at the time. Finally, all participants were located in Utah, and all the interviews were conducted by White, Latter-day Saint men. The resulting publications were all authored or coauthored by White men.

3.3.2. Phase 2a: Families of Shared Faith (2001–2004)

In the next phase of the American Families of Faith project, we sought to significantly address the limitations and strengthen the weaknesses from Phase 1, particularly in diversities of religion, race/ethnicity, gender, and geographic diversity (Dollahite et al. 2004). In comparison to the religious homogeneity of Phase 1, only 7 of the 57 families belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e., 12.2%), and we expanded to 17 other denominations of Christianity (comprising 59.6% of our families), including Black Protestant, evangelical Christian, mainline Christian, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian, as well as Judaism (21.1% of our families) and Islam (7% of our families). Although we somewhat improved in racial/ethnic diversity (i.e., 91.1% of our fathers in Phase 1 were White, and 84.2% of our families in Phase 2a were White), our predominantly White sample remained a notable limitation.

A vital shift occurred when rather than including only fathers, both husbands and wives were interviewed, as well as 84 children and adolescents from 55 of the participating families. Finally, although we expanded our geographic diversity (i.e., Phase 1 conducted only in Utah and Phase 2 conducted in California, Massachusetts, and Connecticut), the lack of geographic diversity continued to be a limitation of our study, particularly given Silk and Walsh’s (2011) book-length study revealing significant differences in religion and culture across eight US regions.

3.3.3. Phase 2b: Marriages of Shared Faith (2001–2019)

As an extension of Phase 2a, we recognized the deep need and value to expand our sample to highlight racial/ethnic and religious minorities and to expand the geographic diversity of our sample. The defining feature that distinguishes between Phase 2a and 2b is that we did not continue to interview adolescents in Phase 2b and instead focused only on interviewing married couples/parents. However, in our analyses and articles, we often combine the sample from Phase 2a and Phase 2b and argue that they are more similar than different (e.g., using largely the same interview questions and sampling strategies). Thus, the following numbers are based on the combined total of families recruited in Phase 2a as well as those recruited in Phase 2b. Of the 231 shared-faith families interviewed (n = 546 individual participants), only 41.1% were White, with the remaining 58.9% comprising racial/ethnic minorities (i.e., 18.6% were Black, 12.1% were Hispanic, 10% were Asian American, 7.4% were Middle Eastern, 4.3% were Native American, 2.6% were East Asian, and 3.9% were interracial/interethnic families).

In addition to racial and ethnic diversity, we also sought to increase religious diversity by sampling over 20 denominations of the Abrahamic faiths: 76.2% were Christian (including various Black Protestant, evangelical Christian, and mainline Christian denominations, as well as Catholic, Orthodox Christian, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), 13% were Jewish, and 10.8% were Muslim. This expanded sample allowed us to more easily examine subsamples of our data from an intersectional lens (e.g., to understand the unique challenges, as well as strengths, of Black Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or Asian Christian women or men, whether adults or children).

Additionally, we substantially expanded the variety of educational and socioeconomic backgrounds represented in our sample. Our geographic diversity significantly increased during this phase, with participants from 23 different states and from all eight socioreligious regions of the United States (Silk and Walsh 2011).

3.3.4. Phase 3: Marriages of Mixed Faith and No Religion (2017–2019)

In Phase 3, we sought to address one notable limitation by expanding our study to include interfaith and religiously unaffiliated couples. Both groups have been on the rise in recent decades, with now approximately 28–42% of US marriages being interfaith (Murphy 2015) and 29% of US adults not identifying with any religion (G. A. Smith 2021). We subsequently sought to understand the nexus of faith and family relationships for these couples.

For our interfaith sample, we recruited 32 heterosexual married interfaith couples (n = 63, as one participant was recently widowed). Couples were from seven of the eight socioreligious regions of the United States (Silk and Walsh 2011), where New England was the one region not represented. The religious makeup of the sample was 25% Latter-day Saints, 21% religiously unaffiliated (including atheists, agnostics, and “nothing in particular”), 17% Catholic, 17% Protestant (including various Black Protestant, mainline Protestant, and evangelical Christian denominations), 10% Jewish, 6% Muslim, 3% Buddhist, and 2% Orthodox Christian. Most participants were White (73%), where ethnic/racial minorities comprised 27% of the people in the sample (i.e., 10% Black, 6% Hispanic, 5% Asian, 3% African, 2% Filipino, 2% Middle Eastern). All the couples, except one, were parents.

Our unaffiliated sample comprised 34 heterosexual married couples (n = 68 individuals). Participants were mainly atheist or humanist. The great majority of the sample (86%) was White. Participants ranged in their educational attainment from completing some high school to completing a doctoral degree. Most of the sample was highly educated, where just over 70% of the sample had completed a four-year college degree or more. All couples had at least one child. We are disappointed that our sample of unaffiliated is so disproportionately White. We think it is so because we chose to sample religious nonbelievers who were associated with a secular community so that those couples would be more comparable to the religious couples that we sampled who had the social support of a faith community. The secular institutions we selected were not as diverse as we had hoped.

3.3.5. Phase 4: Individuals and Families of Faith during COVID-19 (2020)

Until 2020, the American Families of Faith project had limited itself only to qualitative methods, but when COVID-19 hit, we decided to create a mixed-method national study, recruiting 1510 participants from 40 states. Further, the project had limited itself to (a) heterosexual married couples and (b) parents. These two foci did not include several other relational configurations that religion might influence.

In our attempt to better include diverse family situations, we oversampled sexual minorities twofold. Although approximately 5.2% of US adults identified as LGB in 2020 (Jones 2021), 10.4% of our sample identified as a sexual minority. Further, much of the sample was married (i.e., 70.5%), and 2% of our sample were cohabiting and 27.5% were currently single.

We also strived to increase our religious diversity to branch out from the Abrahamic faiths, with 3% identifying as Buddhist and 4.1% identifying as Hindu, and the rest of the sample was 27.4% Protestant, 15.3% Catholic or Orthodox, 17.2% Latter-day Saints, 8.4% Jewish, 8.2% Muslim, 4% atheist, 3.6% agnostic, 4.8% “nothing in particular”, and 3.9% “other” religious denominations.

Although we did not oversample racial minorities as we had done in previous phases, the percentage of the sample that was White alone (i.e., 60%) was similar to census data for the same year (i.e., 61.6%; Jones et al. 2021), where Asian Americans were overrepresented in our study (i.e., 17.8% in our study, 6% in the same year’s census), with the remaining sample being 9.9% Black, 9.3% Hispanic, and 3% other or preferred not to disclose their race/ethnicity. Overall, the sample was highly educated, with 72.4% having a bachelor’s degree or higher. Unfortunately, one limitation of this sample is that we recruited only individuals and did not gain a “whole family” perspective of family matters.

4. Discussion

4.1. Why We Did What We Did

Next, we provide brief explanations for why we chose to approach our study the ways we did. Most of this section pertains to the project up through the end of Phase 2.

4.1.1. Why Highly Religious Families?

When we began the American Families of Faith (AFF) project, highly religious families were understudied. In William James’s classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience, the psychologist of religion had exhorted that studying people at the extremes would yield greater insights. Similarly, leading family stress scholar Pauline Boss (2000) suggested that using prototypical or profound cases of a given phenomenon can offer the deepest insights. Therefore, we thought that an “exemplar” sample of highly religious families from various religious and racial/ethnic communities would help us to better understand the nexus of relationships and religion than would a representative sample in which a smaller percentage of people (probably around 25%) would be highly religious.

4.1.2. Why Only Abrahamic Faiths?

We chose to focus on families from the major Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. This was in part because we wanted to conduct in-depth interviews and then in-depth analyses of those interviews that would allow us to follow Annette Mahoney’s (2010) suggestion to include careful analyses of the influence of substantive religious beliefs on relationships. We did not want to follow most previous work that merely assessed “religiosity” (level of religiousness), but rather, we wanted to strive to achieve an in-depth understanding of core religious beliefs and practices and how those were related to relational processes. We thought that it would be difficult to accomplish this unless we could understand those substantive beliefs. Thus, we thought it best to start out closer to home with faiths that had some broad commonalities with our own faith.

Abrahamic faiths have a few important facets in common, such as geographical origins (the Middle East), a shared emphasis on “the book” (e.g., the Torah, the Bible, and the Qur’an), inspired leaders who wrote scripture (e.g., Moses, Peter, Muhammed), and a belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, and Jacob. While these broad commonalities were present, the diversity of religious beliefs and practices across the more than 20 denominations/branches of the Abrahamic faiths that we had interviewed was substantial. Additionally, because our sample comprised more than 50% racial and ethnic minority families, this added still-greater diversities. Diversities across gender, socioeconomic status, geographical residence, nation of origin, political perspectives, personality, degree of orthodoxy, family culture, and generation further increased the diversities in the sample.

4.1.3. Why Religious Minorities?

We wanted to interview families from several denominations of Christianity and from the major branches or movements of Judaism and Islam. Thus, we interviewed families from 15 Christian denominations, from three major branches of Judaism (Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox), and from two major branches of Islam (Sunni and Shia). In total, two-thirds (66%) of the AFF sample belonged to religious minorities. This allowed us to explore and write about the challenges that parents and youths from religious minorities face in the contemporary United States (Marks et al. 2019).

4.1.4. Why Oversample Latter-day Saints?

We have oversampled members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e., Church of Jesus Christ, LDS, Mormons) in various phases of our American Families of Faith project. There are several reasons for this. Studies have found that active members of the Church of Jesus Christ tend to be especially family oriented and focused on ways to integrate religion and family life (Dollahite et al. 2017). Therefore, if we wanted to study people who are likely to be highly religious and highly familial, this population would fit the bill. In addition, because a high proportion of our funding has come from sources associated with BYU (an institution sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ) and because our “core constituents” are Latter-day Saint members, leaders, donors, and university administrators, it made sense for us to oversample members of our own faith. We have published several social science articles, chapters, and books focused on Latter-day Saints (e.g., Dollahite and Marks 2006; Goodman et al. 2012; Leonhardt et al. 2018; Marks and Dollahite 2022; Marks et al. 2020).

4.1.5. Why Racial/Ethnic Minorities?

Precisely 3 decades ago, Dollahite and Walls (1993) studied value orientations in an ethnically diverse sample of 255 low-income parents of seventh graders. They found statistically significant, theoretically meaningful differences in how Black, European American, and Native American parents viewed and valued core aspects of life (e.g., human nature, orientation to time, community decision-making, and the allocation of resources to children and youths). According to this and other research, it was clear to us that people from different racial/ethnic/cultural backgrounds and perspectives would likely manifest meaningful differences in how their religion influenced their relationships. Therefore, it was important for us to learn from people from both White and racial/ethnic minority families. More than half of the people in the main sample were from various racial/ethnic minority communities. Also important is that about 27% of our participants were first-generation immigrants to the US. This was especially true for the Asian American Christians, the Hispanic Christians, and the Muslims we interviewed.

Rad et al. (2018) examined papers published in 2014 and 2017 in Psychological Science, a leading multidisciplinary journal. They demonstrated that samples from various social science disciplines suffer from a lack of diversity. Williamson et al. (2022) examined 5 years of the top relationship journals (2014–2018) and found that 68% of the samples were primarily White, 21% were racially and ethnically diverse, and 11% were primarily non-White. White people (who comprise 60% of the US population) are currently being oversampled. A disproportionate proportion of the more diverse samples involved qualitative studies. We are pleased to be among the minority of projects producing studies with a high proportion of minority participants.

4.1.6. Why Focus on Relationship Processes?

We are family scholars with interests in family relationship processes. While much social science research focuses on individuals (psychology) or groups and societies (sociology), our interests center on marriage and family relationships and lifespan spiritual development. The focus of the main body of about 200 shared-faith Christian, Jewish, and Muslim families (Phases 2–3) was on understanding the relationship processes in couples and families from diverse communities. We were interested in how and why religious beliefs, practices, and communities influenced marriage and family processes. Therefore, almost all our interviews were conducted in a relational setting (couples together, parents and adolescents together) to allow us to better explore relational processes that would not be as fully accessible and “in context” in individual interviews, surveys, or observations. Further, almost all interviews from Phases 1–3 were conducted face to face in the participants’ homes.

4.1.7. Why Qualitative Methods?

We thought that qualitative analyses of in-depth interviews with highly religious people would best help us answer our two main research questions: (1) How do religious beliefs, practices, and communities influence marriage and family relationships? (2) What is it about being highly religious that can encourage relational strengths? We wanted to invite people from diverse religious and racial/ethnic backgrounds to share their in-depth thoughts, feelings, and narratives about their experiences as a wife, husband, and child in a religious community. We asked a set of broad questions to help us understand the nexus of religion and relationships, of faith and family life. We also asked about challenges and whether there were ways that religious involvement might harm marriage and family relationships.

Williamson et al. (2022) examined 5 years of the top relationship journals (2014–2018) and found only 3% of the articles used qualitative methods (see Marks et al. 2021 for a broader examination). One of the many benefits that we derive from qualitative questions is that this method allows for different opinions to be offered, diverse perspectives to be articulated, unique experiences to be shared, and particular voices to be heard. Therefore, by publishing hundreds of studies and three books that highlight direct quotes from diverse participants, we believe that the American Families of Faith project has furthered the cause of airing the voices of people from various minority communities (religious and racial/ethnic) who are often not heard, acknowledged, or respected by people from majority communities or by social scientists. We are particularly pleased that women from minority racial, ethnic, and religious communities are prominently featured in the findings sections of each of our studies.

These issues are especially relevant in relation to Syed et al.’s (2018) third major concern: what types of questions are valued? Because we asked general questions about the ways that religious beliefs, practices, and communities influenced relationships, this allowed each person, couple, and family to discuss what they valued. Because many of our published studies grew directly from the “spontaneous” expressions of our participants rather than from our a priori hypotheses and research questions, we were responding to the issues, challenges, and concerns of those we interviewed. For example, our work on religious and relational dualities (Dollahite et al. 2018) and on relational struggles in religious families (Dollahite et al. 2019b) was inspired and supported by the spontaneous reports of our participants. There is great value in letting people, especially marginalized people, speak for themselves.

It could be argued that compared with much social science research that tends to ignore or downplay religious influences and emphasizes individual traits (for discussion of this idea, see C. Smith 2014; Syed et al. 2018, pp. 819–20), our project is more respectful of racial/ethnic communities because the AFF project focuses on families of faith, consistent with racial/ethnic minority communities who tend to value both family and religion more than majority communities (Wilcox and Wolfinger 2016). That is, because studies indicate that racial/ethnic minority communities are likely to be more familial and more religious than the national average, our focus has an excellent fit with many minority populations.

4.1.8. Why a Focus on Strengths?

Understandably, because of the demonstrated power of pain and negative experiences (Baumeister et al. 2001), the medical, behavioral, and social sciences have been oriented more toward the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, problems, and conflicts than toward understanding and promoting health, solutions, and strengths. Therefore, we fortunately have learned much about the negative effects of the disorders of bodies, minds, societies, families, and religions. A downside of all this is that deficit models are far more prevalent than strengths models. We ourselves began our research on religious families by conducting in-depth interviews with Latter-day Saint fathers of children with special needs and discussing clinical implications of this research (Dollahite et al. 2002; Marks and Dollahite 2001).

Before we published findings from the American Families of Faith project, the field had seen relatively little research on the relational processes in healthy and happy diverse families of faith, on what kinds of specific religious beliefs and practices were more likely to result in positive relational processes in couples and families, and on what kinds of parental religious practices were more likely to lead to healthy spiritual development among youth. We have attempted to address these types of questions in the AFF project. We hope that our findings can help religious families, religious leaders, and family professionals learn more about the ways to enact religious practices that lead to more-positive personal and relational outcomes.

A major area of emphasis in the American Families of Faith project has been the strengths of Black couples (Skipper et al. 2021) and families (Millett et al. 2018). Few groups have been as maligned and/or marginalized as Black Americans, and when attention is given to Black families in the social sciences, deficits and difficulties tend to be the foci (see Marks et al. 2010). In contrast, nearly a dozen AFF publications have focused solely on strengths, narratives, and insights from Black mothers, fathers, and youth. A coauthored book cataloging and highlighting identified strengths, struggles, and successes is planned (Skipper and Marks, forthcoming).

4.1.9. Commonalities across Categories

Syed et al. (2018) suggested that not including or focusing on racial/ethnic minority populations contributes to the ideology of colorblindness. Much of our work could be criticized for not systematically comparing members of different racial/ethnic communities by not conducting separate analyses of how they “do religion” or “do family” and comparing them with members of other racial/ethnic communities. Indeed, some colleagues who have reviewed our work for scholarly journals have asked us to separate out individuals by racial/ethnic or religious communities. Although we have carried out many “deep dive” pieces that explored a single religious/ethnic community, we have avoided carrying out discrete racial contrasts in articles based on our whole sample because in such articles, we were interested in finding commonalities across diverse groups. This is consistent with Cole’s (2009) third question pertaining to intersectionality by carrying out work that addresses “commonalities cutting across categories often viewed as deeply different” (p. 171). Our “Strengths in Diverse American Families of Faith” special issue of Marriage and Family Review (later published as an edited volume, Strengths of Diverse Families of Faith: Exploring Religious Differences) was our first attempt at a systematic “separate and similar” treatment of eight religious-ethnic communities. Even then, we did not take the classic social science or comparative religious studies approach of contrasting religious-ethnic communities. We have avoided this approach for at least three reasons: (a) we have found so many commonalities across individuals and families from various religious-ethnic communities that focusing on differences was inconsistent with the data, (b) we were typically focused more on relational processes than on religious or racial/ethnic differences, and (c) we believe there is greater personal and societal meaning and value in seeking out and highlighting commonalities across diverse groups. Human beings, including social scientists, are hardwired to perceive and attend to difference.

Our approach to avoiding comparisons between racial groups is consistent with how Helms et al. (2005) problematize using race/racial groupings as a variable for predictive purposes in research design as they represent conceptually meaningless variables (i.e., there are many experiences associated with membership in any social group). Similarly, there is increasing pushback in scholarship against demands for “comparison groups” using Whiteness as a norm. We advocate a more nuanced approach, one that does not erase the import of race and racialized experiences as important to participants but instead strongly resists comparisons between racial groups because this would essentially reify reductionistic conceptualizations of experiences on the basis of race (and erase a diversity of experiences within racial groups as well as across racial groups). In short, we believe ethically responsible social science should work hard to perceive and attend to meaningful similarities across various diversities.

4.1.10. Limitations of the Project

Although we argue that some “limitations” served as strengths in enabling us to accomplish the purposes of the project and although we have made some important improvements over the years, the project certainly has involved several notable limitations and problems. For example, when we began our work on married couples in 2001, heterosexual marriage was the only legal form of marriage in the United States, and we interviewed only heterosexually married and remarried couples until Phase 4, when we oversampled sexual minorities twofold.

Some other sampling limitations of AFF include the following: (a) the sampling approach has been uneven, (b) we began the project with a naïve and idealistic outlook on the potential harms and dangers of religious involvement and took too long to address the potential and real relational harms in religious belief and practice, (c) we probably waited too long to introduce a full-fledged mixed-methods design into our research, (d) we should have interviewed more Hispanic families much sooner in the project, (e) we could have begun interviewing more religiously diverse families (e.g., from non-Abrahamic faiths and religiously unaffiliated) sooner, (f) we could have begun interviewing structurally diverse (e.g., single-parent, same-sex couple) families sooner, and (g) we could have interviewed a more diverse group of adolescent children and youths. Our sampling efforts have been far from perfect.

4.2. What Are the “Fruits” of This and Previous Reflections?

Over the years, we have tried to improve the project by (a) incrementally increasing what we call project-relevant diversity among both the research team and the sample; (b) increasing the rigor and sophistication of the methods of analyses we used; (c) adding to the diversity of the ways of approaching and analyzing the data; and (d) finding ways to share the major findings of the project with a broader range of audiences (public scholarship articles, podcasts, and audio articles).

We are on record in stating that in our earlier studies and publications, we were, in some respects, probably too defensive and triumphalist about the positive value of religious involvement (Dollahite et al. 2018). In retrospect, some of this defensive posturing was a response to influential people in the social sciences (e.g., Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Ellis) expressing vitriolically negative views of religion that seemed to carry over into theory and widely held beliefs in the field (Marks and Dollahite 2017). This seemed dissonant with our reading of the body of social science and health research (Koenig et al. 2001; Mahoney 2010), which has consistently found positive correlations between religious involvement and various kinds of beneficial personal (e.g., mental health and physical health) and relational (e.g., marital, parental, and familial) outcomes. Thus, while we were likely justified in our perspective that religion is helpful to many people across many domains of life, we were unable or unwilling to also recognize that religion can also be extremely harmful to people and relationships. We are grateful to our friend and colleague Annette Mahoney (and to other reviewers of our work) who patiently helped us gain a more balanced perspective. Empirical work on religion, hopefully including our own, has come far over the past 2 decades and now better reflects a sense of even-handedness and fair play.

We have used various methods in our scholarly work to try to minimize and mitigate the influence of our own biases as White, Latter-day Saint, heterosexual, married, middle-class, highly educated, and moderate/conservative academics. However, we are sure that we have failed in various ways. We are on record in stating that we have grown in the understanding, respect, and admiration that we have for our friends of various faiths and for those faith communities (Dollahite and Marks 2020). One way is that we have avoided the “monk in a cell” approach to qualitative scholarship, which involves the perspective of only one person. That is, very few of the empirical publications that have been produced by the American Families of Faith project have been conducted by a sole author. We believe that our team-based approach (Allsop et al. 2022; Marks 2015) helps us minimize various kinds of biases and produce work that is rigorous and replicable.

Processes in Six Religious-Ethnic Communities

If we had not had an honest inventory of our project at earlier phases, we would not be able to highlight the voices of religious-ethnic minority communities in the way that we have. In their call for this special issue, Abo-Zena and Rana mentioned that this special issue would seek to “model the complexity of relations and lived experiences from a phenomenological perspective” and to “center underrepresented populations, traditions, and religious or spiritual influences across traditions”. Accordingly, in this section, we present some narrative accounts from parents and youths across several religious-ethnic communities.1 This section draws from research presented first in a special section of Marriage and Family Review2 that focused on strengths in diverse American families of faith.3

Our purpose for including these direct quotes from parents and their adolescent and emerging adult children is to highlight the voices of understudied and underrepresented people from racial and ethnic minorities and from minority faiths in the United States. Because this is not an original report of research findings but rather an evaluative article that focuses on allowing practitioners of various diverse faiths to have a voice, we will not provide interpretive commentary. Interested readers may consult the original articles in the special issue or the original chapters in the book Strengths of Diverse Families of Faith (Dollahite and Marks 2020).

In this section on parents and children from the various religious-ethnic communities, our focus is not as much on spiritual/religious development but rather on the relational processes of spirituality and religion across diverse religious-ethnic communities. In other words, the main point of this section is to highlight what diverse parents and their children report about religion and spirituality. Our hope is to demonstrate some aspects of the value of listening to the voices of religious adults and children beyond the middle-class White Protestant samples that have historically predominated social science studies on religion.

This section includes direct quotes from parents and their adolescent and young adult children, addressing issues such as religious socialization practices around prayer, belief in God, relationship with God, attending religious services, conflict resolution, relational forgiveness and reconciliation in families, family religious gatherings, how certain religious beliefs can increase love in families, parents as religious role models, religious restrictions, religiously inspired processes such as mutual respect, religious unity, humility, and respecting children’s religious agency.

In sharing these first-person quotes from some people from a few diverse religious-ethnic communities, we do not suggest that all people from a religious-ethnic community are the same. As previously mentioned, there is significant diversity within any religious or ethnic community and within any family. Further, ethnic and religious communities and families have many internal disagreements. The space limits of a journal article will not allow us to provide the kind of nuanced discussion of such intracommunity or intrafamily diversities and differences that could be made after any of the personal quotes we include. Our purpose is merely to offer the gift of the personal voices of some members of some religious-ethnic communities in the hope that their valuable experiences and perspectives may stimulate thinking about relational processes around lifespan spiritual and religious development.

Asian American Christian Families

Parents prayed both with and for their children. Mei-Fen, a Chinese mother, said,

There were several times this year, he said he felt bad when he came back home from school. He wanted me to pray with him hand in hand in his room, and then he felt better. … Prayer has become his practice. [When] he met serious problems, he asked me to pray for him. I asked him what’s wrong when I noticed his depression. [Again], he told me why [he was down] and asked me to pray with him hand in hand. When we pray, he always [has] asked [for] us [to pray together] hand in hand. It seems that he [has] found answers through prayer. I don’t know how to do [this] if we had not believed in God.

Prayer also helped parents and children resolve conflicts. Le, a Chinese wife, said,

A sister in our church who is living with her mom … told me that her mom [once] had a bad temper [and felt that] everybody should listen to her. But now, her mom has her own way to avoid conflicts … prayer. [Now], if they ha[ve] conflicts, her mom w[ill] pray and … not talk back. She found her mom changed. Her mom said she learned from others [in the church] that if there was a conflict, she [should] pray right away. After prayer, she had peace in her heart and did not want to argue. This is a lesson: we [can] change ourselves through prayer.

Participants discussed the importance of transmitting religious values such as praying and caring for others. A Chinese father named Jianguo said,

We know what God wants us to be. We have a goal that we want to be a person that pleases God. We hope our children [will also] … please God. When they grow up, they will glorify God and benefit others. This is [our] central and only [hope for our children].

Deshi, a Japanese husband, said,

Parents are the best teacher for their kids. Kids like to imitate parents. Parents have [a] big influence on kids about how to be a human. [If] I said to them do not lie, then I should not lie. … Kids will learn from the model of parents. If we have a good relationship [in our marriage, our] kids will feel safe. They would not fight each other. They would get along well. Faith is beneficial to both marriage and family.

Black Christian Families

One Black mother, Kayla, spoke about helping children build a relationship with God:

In raising kids, you want to teach them to take everything that happens in their lives to God, whether it’s a test or whether it’s a decision about if they’re gonna go to the prom or go on a certain date … just to make God the focus of it and include Him, because it is a relationship more … than a religion.

A Black father named Orlando referenced his parental responsibilities as outlined by God:

The more that I study about my Creator, [He] really … outlines … what my responsibilities are. And what that means to me is to really embrace [my family] with all the heart and all the love that I have. … [T]he life that I have and the world that I live in sometimes are opposing each other. This world tries to pull people apart, but through my religious faith I’m able to hold my family and the people I love together [even though] I know that there’s a force that’s working against love, peace, and harmony. … [T]here is a much higher standard I’ve learned about, and what that standard means … is that with this life that I have, I must give my life for my family. There’s no limit to what I should give to my family.

Marcus shared his related perspective that, as a Black father,

In order for me to love my kids, I must first love myself. So when the Lord loves me and I get to know who I am and get to love myself, then I can reach that love out to [my kids]. The love I have for them is the same kind of love [God] has for all of us. … [At least] one time in the course of every day, I tell my kids, “I love you”, give ’em a big hug … hold ’em, let them know I care. I let them know I love [them]—not because it’s just the thing to say, but because I DO. And [I tell them], “God loves you too”. So even when we do go through little life struggles, it’s okay, because someone who loves them is going to be there throughout the good and the bad.

Catholic and Orthodox Families

On faith, a White Catholic mother, said,

We pray together as a family. [My husband] Jake is so good about [it] at bedtime. [I don’t think he] has never missed a night, praying with the children, the boys in their room, because they’re in the same room, and then the girls. I think for them, it’s routine. And for them it’s … being a part of the family. I think that evens their day out.

Carlos, a Hispanic Catholic father, explained the importance of attending mass:

We try to make Sunday more family oriented. … And I also agree with [my wife] Aida [about] … attending [mass]. For me, attending Mass on Sunday is one of the things we do religiously that I feel that keeps us together. I think [Sunday is] a time when we’re not talking, where we’re listening. We’re listening to a message that applies to all of us. I think that by sitting side by side, almost touching, aware of the presence of the others, while we are quiet and just focused on one particular scene, [this] allows us to get closer.

Pedro, a 15-year-old Hispanic son, spoke of the comfort he received from his mother’s prayers:

When we say different things we want to pray for, like for the day, I know my parents are praying for the things that I need help with. I know that my Mom’s going to be praying for me too. And it gives me reassurance, and it just makes me feel better that we’re all family and we’re doing this all together as one.

A Catholic mother named Angela spoke about the power of prayer in her parenting:

[Sometimes I say to God], “Restrain me. I want to hit someone right now”. And it’s very real. It’s not just like I’m reciting some poem or something, it’s a conversation I’m having with someone. And it helps. It always helps [to] calm me down, [and] give me some perspective.

A Hispanic Catholic mother shared a similar sentiment:

[My faith] keeps me in check for sure. Because I could really come unhinged if it weren’t for me remembering, this is not how you are supposed to act. This is not how you are supposed to deal with this situation. It helps me stay focused and to be a better person.

Jewish American Families

Eija, a Reform Jewish mother, spoke of how Judaism helped her and her family members with forgiveness:

There’s a big emphasis in our services on taking responsibility for [and] forgiving other people, on praying for forgiveness for yourself, praying for healing for other people. … It take[s] you out of yourself. And it works with the kids, too, because there’s prayers that the parents say to their children. … [It’s] a nice bonding thing. … [It] relax[es] all those tensions.

Aliyah, also a Reform Jewish mother, also spoke of this:

One of the things that we do regularly … when I’m wrong, [is that] I’m able to tell my daughter, “I’ve been wrong, and this is why I’ve been wrong”. And to ask her forgiveness is a really important part of Judaism. … If you have wronged another individual, you have to work out the relationship with the individual before you can get real forgiveness from G-d. [However], that’s not why I do it. … The real important part to me is that my daughter knows that I’m able to say “I’m wrong” when I’m wrong. … I teach her that.

Pesha, a mother, discussed her weekly parental blessings of children:

Blessing the children on Friday night … is a special time when the parents bless the children. It is a beautifully wonderful and tender moment that we … do and our children have come to expect. [We don’t just] put our hands on their heads and we bless them … we also each [say] something to each child about something that we’re proud of that they’ve done this week. It’s just a wonderful thing that … we didn’t make that up. … [I]f we just look at what our tradition teaches us, it was already there. Jewish parents have been doing that for thousands of years.

An Orthodox Jewish family consisting of Benjamin, a 20-year-old son; Deborah, his 17-year-old sister; Hannah, their mother; and Eli, their father, discussed Jewish laws and practices that engender respect between parents and children:

Benjamin (son): [My family] argue[s] over little things all the time, of course, like anybody. But we’ve never had any serious, emotional arguments that disrupted general family life. I’m sure that Judaism has a lot to do with that … because you have laws governing how you’re supposed to act towards your parents and towards your children. And when you have a legal system, almost, [that prescribes] in what ways you can respond, you aren’t so totally at sea, as many people are.

Deborah (daughter): On how to … interact with your parents.

Benjamin (son): And your children. It goes both ways.

Hannah (mother): [We have] mutual respect.

Eli (father): We’re very wise and loving parents. [kidding]

Benjamin (son): Yeah [you are]. … Having … respect for your parents is something that is not generally a common trait in this society, but … it’s impossible to be Halakhically observant and not have respect for your parents.

Latter-day Saint Families

Many LDS couples and families spoke about their belief in eternal things such as eternal life, eternal progression, eternal marriages, and eternal families. A husband, Don, said,

We talked earlier about th[e] concept of eternal progression and that my wife and I can be together forever. … In the same aspect by doing this [unifying temple] work for our own families and other families, we have th[e] potential of being together as families forever, not just my wife and I, but my wife and my children and my grandparents, my parents, their parents, and so on and so forth. By accomplishing this work, through our beliefs, we’re able to accomplish that strength, that family unity.

Alecia, a 20-year-old Hispanic daughter, said,

Knowing that we are going to be together forever, that we’ve been sealed as a family, that we are bound forever, [that] we have that bond—it’s like fighting … seems trivial when you think about it. … When someone has a problem, you’re more willing to help them because you know you’re going to spend eternity with that person and you’re going to love them—whether or not you like it… And most of the time you do, but it just makes it [easier, during] the hard times, to get through it.

One mother said, “Believing in families being forever is [central]. … We will be their parents forever and they will be our children forever”. Another mother, Heidi, said,

I have such intense love, such amazing attachment … to [our] children. You start to see the love … Heavenly Father has for you. It starts to connect. You can … [understand] unconditional love. No matter what these kids ever do … we will just love them beyond belief. … You can see how your Heavenly Father can have that love for you.

Several LDS participants mentioned their weekly family home evening. A Hispanic mother, Consuella, said,

Family home evening is a meeting we have, the whole family, parents and the children. We have the meeting every week, we sing a hymn, we have a prayer, someone in the family prepares a short lesson or teaching from the gospel. Sometimes my husband Roberto prepares a longer lesson and our older daughter … retell[s] the lesson in her words. This has had a tremendous impact on her.

Muslim American Families

One Arab American Muslim father, Ayyub, said that “teach[ing] by example [is] the most important thing. You cannot expect your child to do something that is opposite of what you do. … If they see you do certain things, they will do them”. A mother named Angie said,

In terms of religion, it doesn’t matter how much the father talks to the children, the children will learn from what the father does. … If my children see my husband go to the mosque every night for prayer [which he does], he is setting an example. I don’t have to “teach” it. They are seeing it.

Hakim, an Arab American Muslim father, said,

Maybe right now… I can dictate what they do. “Don’t do this, do this”. I can control it; but I believe the better approach for my children is to educate them. … One day they will be out [in the world on their own] … so the idea of policing their behavior, I don’t this is the right thing. The best thing is to really educate them. … [I] feel guilty when I tell them “Don’t do this” [without giving an explanation].

An Arab American mother named Pakeezah spoke of a time when her 11-year-old daughter was invited to go see a friend’s rock band perform:

We had to say no and she was [a] little upset at first because she did not get to see her friend and support them. She wanted to be able to support them but … we explain[ed] … “I understand you want to support your friend and that is great … it is great to support your friend. But also, you [must] look at other things. Like somebody sees a Muslim girl there, they will think it is okay for Muslims to do this, so you are not only representing your religion, but you also have to understand that there are certain things that you can and can’t do because Allah has set these priorities and these guidelines and there are reasons for them”. So, I think once [children] have this understanding, it is easier for them to [hear] no.

Several Muslim parents spoke of processes of relational mutuality called Shura. Yuusif, an Arab American husband and father, said,

[Shura is] mutual consultation for which there are injunctions in the Qur’an and in the Prophets’ teachings that the husband, or the father, is not a dictator. The decisions in the family … should be made with consultation, including your children. … Everybody feels that they are a partner in it. And they have a chance to voice the positives and negatives. … [T]hat also helps avoid a lot of conflict because people don’t feel that [they] have [a] voice.

Aisha, a Muslim mother, said, “You’re allowed to speak, but just remember who you’re speaking to and how you do it. [I]t’s the same thing I’ve brought … to my children, because we believe in respect”. Maryam, Aisha’s daughter, said first, “There’s that mutual thing that I respect them”, and said second, “they are very merciful upon me, and they guide me”, and because of this two-way law, “I have a peaceful relationship with them. And there’s a lot of understanding”.

One parent emphasized the importance of,

being constantly alert with them and close to them in understanding what they’re going through and being, you know, understanding of them. [It is important to be] in touch so that they don’t think … “Well, my parents grew up in a different place, different generation, they don’t know”. … [We must] keep up with them … which means talking the way they do, [on their level].

Aisha mentioned her open dialogues with her children:

We talk a lot. We have very in-depth conversations because … they’re verbal. They have their opinions and we’ve always told them, “You can always say what you need to say, but just say it with the right tone”. So they’re allowed to express themselves, even if they disagree with us. We don’t have a problem with that.

Banafsha, an Indian Muslim mother, mentioned her family’s flexibility in connection with salat (Islamic prayer five times per day):

We don’t want to delay the prayer of anybody. If they are studying, they can pray in their room and keep studying [and] not wait for the other ones because you see, we wash up before we pray. So, that was a reason, we didn’t want to make it hard for anybody. But I think that the good thing was when you go to anybody’s room, it’s time for prayer, they either have already prayed, or they are praying.

Qualitative research that highlights the voices of diverse religious parents and their children can provide important information about the processes involved in child, youth, and emerging adult religious and spiritual socialization.

Unexpected Meaningful Findings

Here, we briefly mention a few of the unexpected meaningful findings that emerged from the AFF project.

Probably the most important unexpected meaningful finding for us has been the importance of exploring ways that religious involvement can be harmful to couple and family relationships (Dollahite et al. 2018). We have studied, for example, relational struggles in religious families (Dollahite et al. 2019b) and how religion can lead to both helpful and harmful marital relationships (Kelley et al. 2020) and parent–child relationships (Kelley et al. 2022).

Other unexpected findings include the importance of parents trying to balance religious firmness with religious flexibility (Dollahite et al. 2019c) as well as balancing desires for their children to continue their religious legacy with their children’s religious agency (Barrow et al. 2021). We were also surprised to find how spiritual experiences could help family members overcome the results of adverse experiences, including even trauma (Dollahite et al. 2020).

We were also surprised at how many important findings came because of what we call “spontaneous findings”, in which we did not ask a question about an issue but because a large number of our participants mentioned it as important, we conducted careful analyses of those issues. This includes findings about relational reconciliation after conflicts (Dollahite et al. 2019a).

We were also surprised to find out how sexuality and religion intersect in highly religious families (Clarke et al. 2022), including the ways that couples sanctify sexual relationships (Leavitt et al. 2021b), uphold or challenge boundaries and rules about sex (Allsop et al. 2021), and take on gender roles (Leavitt et al. 2021a).

Perhaps the most welcome unexpected finding was how much we grew to deeply respect and admire the religious lives of everyone we interviewed. We developed a sense of what Krister Stendhal, former dean of the Harvard Divinity School, called holy envy, by which he meant an admiration for another’s faith that leads to wishing one’s own faith had aspects of that faith. We wrote about this in our special issue on the strengths of diverse families (Marks and Dollahite 2018; Dollahite and Marks 2018).

4.3. Opportunities for Growth and Future Directions of the American Families of Faith Project

No one study or project can adequately address all questions, issues, or populations. For the bulk of our work until recently, we have chosen to focus on relational process among couples with shared faith (e.g., both spouses Catholic or both spouses Jewish) among a religiously, geographically, racially, and ethnically diverse population. Only recently have we broadened the sample to include interfaith couples and couples who are not religious. Although the bulk of our studies have explored processes among “stable” couples (typically married for at least 7 years, 20 years on average), our current and future work (RESTARTS) focuses on religious and relational changes. Thus, we are adding a significant new dimension to the project: the complex interactions between relationships and spiritual transformations and religious transitions.

4.3.1. RESTARTS

Although research indicates that religious change can have a negative relationship with family relationship outcomes, relatively little research has sought to understand how families can repair or protect their relationships when facing this situation (see Knight et al. 2019 for a notable exception). Given the frequency of such religious changes, we argue that it is important for increased research in understanding the mediating and moderating processes between religious/spiritual changes and family relationships, with a particular focus on malleable processes.

Given cultural trends toward greater personal and societal secularity and given the increasing frequency of religious changes among adults, youths, and children, we believe there is substantial need for more research on connections between religious changes (e.g., conversion, deconversion, and reconfiguration) in family members and family relationship processes. To assist in the exploration of these processes, we have begun a project we call RESTARTS (Relationship Experiences, Spiritual Transformations, Attachments, Religious Transitions, and Sanctifications). In Spring of 2023, we will begin to collect data on these processes by using a mixed-methods design. In this effort, we seek to learn from this audit and our project so far, to improve on the weaknesses and retain the strengths of the project thus far.

Diversity of Research Team

To maintain both etic and emic perspectives, we have already included as part of our research team those who have changed religions and those who have consistently kept the same religion. Similarly, members of the team have experienced the relational repercussions that arise when a family member (e.g., parent, child, and sibling) changes their religion or leaves religion. As we are still developing this project, we are striving to continue to increase the other relevant diversities mentioned in this audit.

Diversity of Products

We will continue to strive to sponsor student-driven research, and thus, Dollahite and Marks invited their student (Justin Hendricks) to work on it as an undergraduate student. He showed such interest and promise that he was invited to be a co-PI on the first grant we obtained and is a leader of this new endeavor. Further, we will continue to include both female and male authors in meaningful ways and have already recruited interested female collaborators. We anticipate spending a significant portion of our time in the future publishing “public scholarship” for lay audiences to influence a wider array of people (for a report on our existing public scholarship see: https://americanfamiliesoffaith.byu.edu/00000186-5536-d9be-a9d6-557ef3d70001/aff-public-scholarship-report-2018-2022 (accessed on 6 February 2023)).

Lastly, we hope to oversample different religious and racial/ethnic minority groups so that we can write about them individually from an intersectional lens, in addition to looking at similarities across groups.

Diversity of Sample

In sum, we wish to keep many of the best practices that we have carried out thus far in the project and expand to become even more diverse. As with Phase 4, we will continue to sample and/or oversample sexual, religious (including non-Abrahamic faiths and religiously unaffiliated individuals), and racial/ethnic minorities. Further, we have decided to continue using a mixed-method approach rather than sample only individuals, to feature a mixture of both dyadic and individual information both to obtain the perspective of multiple family members and to allow for more-diverse family arrangements.

4.3.2. Interdisciplinary Collaboration with Scholars in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

We have been fortunate to be able to collaborate with colleagues from several disciplines during the AFF project. Our field, family studies and human development, is itself a multidisciplinary field. Human development is a broad and complex discipline. Some would say that the field of family studies is more like a type of area studies (e.g., Middle Eastern studies or women’s studies) than a discipline. Our own training in psychology, sociology, family and consumer sciences, marriage and family therapy, and religious studies affords us an interdisciplinary perspective on the issues we address. However, we have also been privileged to include key contributors and other collaborators from political science and social work and people with both doctoral degrees in the social sciences and both training and experience in the clergy.

On the other hand, some of our respected colleagues have expressed surprise that we continue to publish from this data set. It is certainly fair to argue that with nearly 150 published articles and chapters (and three books), we may have exhausted this data set, and it is time to stop trying to squeeze more from it. Although we do not suggest that our little project is in the same league as the Fragile Families project (we note that more than 1000 publications have come from that data set), because we have been building our data set over more than 2 decades and have in-depth interview data from over 700 diverse women, men, and adolescents, we likely will continue to explore this data set while also turning newly invigorated attention to the RESTARTS project. We have incorporated some mixed methods in some publications coming from the data set, such as in developing the faith activities in the home scale (FAITHS, see Lambert and Dollahite 2010), but the RESTARTS project will use a decidedly mixed-method design.

Are there additional, important questions that can be best answered by continued analyses on our main (shared faith) data set, or have we exhausted that data set? On the one hand, we feel that we have only tapped a small proportion of the more than 10,000 pages of transcription data. Further analyses on yet-unasked questions (e.g., on the ways that women and men differ in how they approach spiritual development processes) and the use of innovative data exploration and analysis approaches such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and language modeling (LM) could allow us to answer novel sets of questions and explore new issues with cutting-edge tools. One promising approach that we are currently employing is working with some AI/ML/LM faculty at BYU to conduct some “qualitative replication studies” (using AI/ML/LM to try to replicate our previous analyses). So far, we have used sentiment analysis alongside different algorithms in Python and found that some of our previous findings have been partly but not fully replicated, but we are in the early stages of exploring how to do such analyses and correctly interpret the findings. Thus, we hope that our collaboration with our colleagues in AI/ML/LM might produce a quality of analysis for our very large qualitative data set that might be considered methodologically rigorous and interesting enough to be considered for the best journals in the fields wherein we publish. We invite our colleagues conducting qualitative research to consider the potential benefits of working with colleagues in AI/ML/LM with their data sets.

We are concerned about some developments in the social sciences. The strong preference for large, representative, longitudinal samples employing quantitatively sophisticated statistical analyses over and against smaller, diverse, qualitative samples employing rigorous qualitative analyses may simply continue the long-present pattern of marginalizing diverse individuals. In many social science circles, it has become sacrosanct that longitudinal data and analyses are the gold standards and the only ways to establish causal relationships. The work of Lam and Bengo (2003), Levinson et al. (1990), and Seirmarco et al. (2012) suggests that, in certain situations, such as understanding the impact of a crisis, taking retrospective simultaneous measures of pre-event outcomes and post-event outcomes may be more effective than taking a pre-test/post-test approach.

The now-almost-religious devotion to the superiority of longitudinal design makes it much more difficult to publish qualitative work and other work that focuses on process and meaning in smaller, more-diverse samples. For example, as mentioned previously, Williamson et al. (2022) found that of the articles published in the top five relationships journals from 2014 to 2015, only 3% were qualitative studies. More high-quality qualitative studies on spiritual development across the lifespan in diverse samples would provide greater ability to better understand the experience of an increasingly diverse population.

4.3.3. Ideological Diversities

One reason we have used plurals, i.e., diversities, equities, and inclusions, is that there are important diversities beyond those typically included in the DEI lists of most institutions. One of the most important of those that influences research projects is ideological diversity. Those with more conservative perspectives have been marginalized in the social sciences, and there have been negative consequences because of it.

Duarte et al. (2015) brought to bear an array of data indicating that the social sciences feature a left-leaning bias and made the case that more ideological diversity will improve the practice and products of social science. Our experience with the American Families of Faith (AFF) project has been that having ideologically diverse research teams (e.g., with progressive, moderate, and conservative scholars) tends to produce richer and more-rigorous results than an ideologically homogeneous team can. More blind spots are accounted for with such an approach, resulting in a clearer and more expansive vision of the phenomenon or topic of interest (Marks 2012, 2015).

In an editorial titled “A Lack of Ideological Diversity is Killing Social Research”, published in Times Higher Education, Columbia University professor of sociology, Musa al-Gharbi (2017) wrote,

the long leftward trajectory of US institutions of higher learning seems to have culminated with conservative faculty, students, and perspectives almost completely absent from many fields, while dissent from progressive ideology is met with increasing sanctions and scandal—from which even historical figures are not immune.

However one may feel about these developments from a moral or political point of view, they are harmful for the practice and profession of science—especially for the social and behavioral sciences.

Musa al-Gharbi goes on to posit that the overwhelming domination of progressive ideology in higher education has significant costs:

The ideological homogeneity of contemporary academic institutions—especially in fields related to the humanities or social and behavioral sciences—serves to broaden the disconnect between the ivory towers and the rest of society, between theory and practice, research and applications. It poses an existential threat to the integrity, credibility, utility (or even the continued viability) of social research.

Thus, a lack of ideological diversity among teams of scholars decreases the ability of social research to understand, reach, and help diverse people and groups.

We suggest that teams of scholars studying lifespan spiritual development would be benefited by having team members with various types of diversities, including ideological diversities. We think the research will be better for it. We want to recognize, with admiration and appreciation, two leading progressive scholars in family studies, Marilyn Coleman and Larry Ganong, who, on two occasions, reached out to Dave, in part because they knew that he was more ideologically conservative and religious than most other social scientists, to write a chapter for their handbook of contemporary families (Dollahite et al. 2002) as well as a chapter on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for their encyclopedic social history of families in the US (Dollahite 2014). We believe that when scholars reach out beyond their own ideological perspectives to include those with very different ones, their project and the entire field is improved.

We are grateful for the ideological, theoretical, and methodological diversity of many of our colleagues who have conducted thoughtful reviews of our manuscripts. Our having received and responded to the concerns and suggestions of those who are quite different from us have greatly improved the published manuscripts. We know that our work has benefited by hearing and responding to diverse voices, and we think the entire field is too.

5. Potential Takeaways (What Other Researchers Might Gain from This Audit)

Here, we briefly suggest possible takeaways from this audit for current and future colleagues in the study of lifespan spiritual development.

First and foremost, we believe in the power of diverse people working together. We believe it makes for better science and better societies. We think that establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives matters most. This includes diversities of people in samples and on scholarly teams. It includes diversities of people in conceptualizing the study, data collection, analyses, and writing. Yes, concepts count. Sure, methods matter. But people are paramount. This includes those who are willing to share their lives, experiences, and thoughts with you as your participants and those who are willing to share their careers with you as your collaborators.

We have tried to illustrate the potential value in using direct quotes from parents and children in understudied and minority religious and ethnic communities. We think that interviewing family members as a unit can bring out important information that individual interviews, surveys, or observations cannot. We believe in the power of conversations to draw forth experiences and ideas from multiple family members. We particularly believe in the importance of giving marginalized people and groups a prominent voice in social science. We think the science is better for it, and the potential for the science to improve society is greater because of it.

Periodically and systematically take stock of your work, your motivations, your aspirations, your achievements, your yet-unfulfilled hopes for the project. Be as clear as possible with one another about the reasons for your choices. No study can be all things to all people. Scholars and students make hard choices. Be clear about your reasons for doing so. Each team of scholars must try to do what they currently think would make the most difference to the field and to the world.

The review process is a challenging and potentially rewarding dialogue. No editor, no reviewer, and no scholar has all the expertise or answers for any given manuscript. The small community of scholars who make up the author(s), editor(s), and reviewer(s) for each manuscript can work together in good faith to produce the best article that has the best chance to advance the field.

We invite our colleagues to consider other innovative conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of the many fascinating ways that spiritual and religious development occurs, especially within families.