The Developing Belief Network is an established collaborative of global researchers studying how we come to believe what we do about the world and our place in it. We have developed and validated tasks and protocols suitable for cross-cultural research in nearly 50 unique samples, and interviewed more than 2300 children and their caregivers at 3 timepoints about various dimensions of religious and spiritual development.
We now aim to support open science goals through curating and sharing our longitudinal datasets and curating and sharing our protocols and methods to promote reuse of our rich data and research materials. These data and the associated protocols are the first of their kind in both their global scope and focus on the development of religious concepts and beliefs. When broadly distributed, they have the potential to enhance—and perhaps change—our understanding of religious and spiritual development across the lifespan, with a particular ability to speak to how developmental and intergenerational transmission processes contribute to religious and cultural change.
