Religious and spiritual development: children's drawings of gods

Over the last few decades the study of the concept of God (also image/representation) has become one of the main research areas of the psychology of religion. This issue has been approached from different psychological perspectives, including cognitive developmental psychology, object relations theory, cognitive psychology, attribution theory and attachment theory. The concept of God is a very complex psychological construct and many scholars have noted the limitation of its current measurement, which relied mostly on verbal measures: questionnaires, interviews, list of adjectives to describe gods, etc…
The “Drawings of gods” research, headed by Prof. Pierre-Yves Brandt, is a project developed in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Lausanne. The project aims to contribute to further understanding of the origin and development of the concept of God by using children’s drawings collected in different cultures and different religious traditions. Although the use of this method has been criticized, it has the potential to provide considerably more information on the way in which children conceptualize God. This more appropriate research tool offers the opportunity to undertake at the same time developmental and cross-cultural research, the lack of which has greatly limited advancements in the field.

Web-Based Database “ Drawings of gods”

The “Drawings of gods” Web-Based Database is designed to store research data and make it available not only to scholars affiliated with the research project but also to the broader public who will be interested in this issue. The data began with 142 children’s drawings collected in 2003-2004 in Japan by a Japanese student Yuko Kagata for her Master’s degree. Currently the database contains more than 1’000 drawings collected in Japan, Romania, Russia, and Switzerland, and it is continually growing.
In the future we expect that the database will be of interest to researchers in new countries and the database will be expanded and enriched by drawings of God from other cultures. For further information or if you would like to participate in the research, please contact the project coordinator Professor Pierre-Yves Brandt Pierre-Yves.Brandt@unil.ch

Access to database

Search interface, available in French and English, provides two modes to use it: for a guest user and for an authorized user:
Guest users can browse and view drawings, read descriptions made by a child.
Authorized users, affiliated with the research project, are provided by a password and have larger access to the data: various options for online working with data, access to the back page of drawings with the description made by a child, and to questionnaires filled by the children. They have also access to a larger version of the drawings.

For guest user: Select the account name "Invité(e)/sans mot de passé/" and click on "Valider."
For authorized user: Select the account name "Compte avec mot de passé". Enter your valid user name (compte) and password (mot de passe). Then click on “valider”.
 

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