What Does Spirituality Look Like?
Imagine you agreed to be part of a focus group. At the beginning of the meeting you are handed a blank sheet of paper and colored pencils. Then the facilitator asks you to draw a picture of spirituality. What would you draw? And when asked to describe your picture, what would you say?
As part of the Fetzer Institute’s Study of Spirituality in the United States, focus group participants produced drawings and definitions of spirituality. Along with being fascinated with people’s sketches and descriptions of spirituality, I wondered if the act of drawing spirituality made a difference in how people responded. After analyzed the focus group data, I compared the results to an unrelated study in which survey respondents were asked to write a definition of spirituality without using images. Here I summarize the results, which appear in the journal Perspectives in Religion (Summer 2022).
Interestingly, definitions of spirituality elicited through focus group participants’ drawings most frequently refer to the natural world and the self like the photo below, whereas the words-only responses of the comparison study emphasized monotheistic deities (God, Allah, or Yahweh) and higher beings (higher power or supreme being). Participants who began their definitions by drawing spirituality oriented it toward emotional, existential, ethical, behavioral, and relational dimensions at higher rates than the comparison study’s respondents, whereas open-ended survey responses were more cognitive (emphasizing belief, faith, knowledge, or meaning). In short, the drawing-based study helped illuminate aspects of spirituality that may not have been noticed otherwise.
Photo 1. Commentary on this drawing from Roberta, a study participant: “I guess I kind of interpreted it as being sort of at peace and being relaxed and able to reflect, so I had myself sort of lying in the field, and lying down, and my hands up behind my head, and I’m just kind of looking up hopefully with a sort of a contemplative look on my face. And it’s nice out. A little cloudy, but sunny. And that's kind of how I interpreted it. . . Maybe contemplating, and I don’t know if I used it when I was describing, but also being more self-aware and able to reflect on things that are meaningful to me.” —Roberta S., 64, Boston (Religious, Not Spiritual).
While the perspective these data offer on spirituality are important, equally important is the methodological contribution this study makes in the social scientific study of religion. Simply put, who one asks is as important as how one asks. By starting with a prompt to draw spirituality, focus group facilitators invited participants to take them down pathways that a words-only survey response did not make available. To ask someone to visualize spiritual and religious phenomena through pictures is to invite a narrative.
People make meaning through stories. Narratives offer detail and nuance to definitions of spirituality. It is one thing to say that spirituality involves nature and the self, but it is another thing to present a visual narrative showing yourself relaxing in a field on a blanket, hands folded behind one’s head, looking up at the sky while contemplating. I am persuaded that one of the most important differences between an open-ended survey question and visual elicitation techniques has to do with the images themselves. Starting with a drawing or photograph invites story.
While interfaith understanding was not the goal of Fetzer Institute’s focus groups, the approach sheds light on the ways conversations unfold differently with and without images. Drawings and photographs represent an important pathway for communicating. The visual dimension makes a difference in how people understand one another and the topic they are exploring.