esquema versão 1 (6)

6. Method
This research will start with a systematic analysis and evaluation on the researches done so far in regard with the topic “God and adolescents”. I will search to present and evaluate the relevant literature focused on the conceptual representation of God, the factors related to or predictive of these representations, the development of God representations. This analysis won’t limit itself to report and compare the previous researches but also to discuss them epistemological and theoretically.

Then I will present the theory of social representations and the reasons why it can be a good theoretical instrument to study the theme of this research.

I will also try an overview of the most relevant theological literature pertinent to this theme.

With a good theoretical support (empirical and theological) it becomes easy to design the empirical analysis instrument and procedures.
The empirical part of this research will have the following steps:
1 – Questionnaire elaboration
The questionnaire will have the following fields:
• Age: (interval)
• Number of Years in a catechetical group: (interval)
• 3 persons influenced most your image of God (Open ended; nominal)
• 3 events influenced most your image of God (open ended; nominal)
• How do you classify the quality of your relationship with your catechist (likert-scale)
• Religious practice (mass attendance, confession attendance; personal prayer; ordinal)
• How do you classify your parents religious affiliation (closed-ended; ordinal)
• Inductors (about God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, personal relation with God)
o 10 fields for each
o Order them by relevance
o Mark each one as Positive, Negative, Neutral

2 – Pre-test of the questionnaire with a small sample
3 – Corrections and improvements to the questionnaire
4 – Sampling procedure
I propose to follow a stratified sampling strategy, according to gender, age and ecclesial belonging factors.
(How to deal with the gender distortion? We estimate there is a 80-20 ratio of girls-boys involved in catechetical processes during adolescence…)
steps:
1. Identify and invite catechist usually working with adolescents;
2. Use the pair catechist-group as a second level unit of analysis
3. Apply the research instrument to the adolescents actually belonging to the group
4. Ask the catechist for help to get in touch with adolescents that used to belong to the group
5 – Questionnaire application

6 – Preliminary data analysis

7 – Focus group and individual interviews to confirm and get a deeper understanding of the preliminary data analysis

8 – Final data analysis

9 – Theological evaluation of the data