Thesis Christ: Believing in God, Yourself, and More with Natalie Norman
At a college with the motto of “Communism, Atheism, Free Love,” you’d be forgiven in assuming religion may not be the prime concern on everyone’s minds. Yet, for Natalie Norman ‘25, Reedies’ religious and spiritual beliefs can lend significant insights into the mental factors behind religion in the population at large. In her psychology thesis, Norman investigates the relationship between faith and views of the self, as shown by people’s measures of self-efficacy and self-worth.
To study this question, Norman surveyed two populations of students from Reed and the University of Florida in the interest of comparing the groups, one more likely to be spiritual than religious, and the other more likely to be religious than spiritual, respectively. Norman predicted that the Reed population’s views of self-worth would be influenced to a greater degree by their spiritual beliefs, while the students from the University of Florida would be driven more by religion. Norman’s survey assessed participants’ self-professed beliefs on religion and spirituality alongside their measures of self-worth and self-efficacy, combining various preexisting scales to compile this information all at once.
Norman was inspired to pursue this research first by her personal interest in religion and spirituality. “I’ve been getting into religion a lot these past four years, but I’ve also been into spirituality,” she said. However, the lack of existing material on religion and psychology stood out to her. As she remarked, “I was just doing a bunch of research on religion in general in psychology and what it looks like, and it was really bare.” While her research is largely unique, she noted, “I’m using a bunch of [pre-existing] research to show why I did it this way instead of another way.” In particular, Norman modified other studies’ scales for measuring religion to ask if participants are religious as a yes or no question rather than a more open-ended numerical scale. Describing this choice, she said, “I don’t really understand why they did it like that, so I wanted to make it really clear to me.”
Norman expressed that she was glad to be able to pursue her own interests with the thesis under psychology professor Kathy Oleson, although Oleson’s own research does not deal with religion. She explained her motivation to study a more niche topic, explaining, “It was because I was really interested in something and there wasn’t a lot of research on it, so I was like, ‘I’ll just bring what I want to do into this project.’”
After completing the survey, Norman has made several significant discoveries from the data she collected. Consistent with her predictions, Norman found that Reedies are more spiritual than religious when compared to the University of Florida students. Additionally, for those who are religious, Reedies displayed higher intrinsic motivation behind their faith, while the University of Florida students had more extrinsic motivation. As for the connections between these factors, Norman remarked, “What’s interesting is that when Reedies have an intrinsic motivation for their religion, that is the greatest motivator for their view of the self.” She further explained the implications of religious beliefs on how people view themselves within the populations surveyed, which “shows that religion is a better predictor of greater self-worth and greater self-efficacy than spirituality and other realms of religion.”
While the results of the survey offer more significant evidence for religion as a predictor of self-worth, they provided important insight into spirituality as a concept for Norman. “I think it’s definitely changed the way I see spirituality and understand it,” she reflected, and went on to describe how she has “learned how to define spirituality” through her thesis as “how you go about life and how you feel in the moment.”
Norman believes her data could be the subject of future research on a variety of topics, which she would be interested in pursuing outside of the intense academic environment of a Reed senior thesis. “I don’t want to be in such a stressed environment... I’d rather do research chilling in my house, sipping on my coffee, just putting it down whenever I want to and picking it up whenever I want to,” she explained. When it comes to the thesis process, Norman expressed her frustration with how “it seems like new information is being presented every week,” without clear instructions being given in advance. She also questioned the timeline, proposing that “orals should be before Renn Fayre.”
Overall, however, Norman has found her thesis to be a valuable learning experience for both specific concepts in her subject area and broader conclusions for the field as a whole. Apart from the areas of improvement she pointed out, she affirmed that “it’s a good process and it’s fun, as long as you can stay on track and get in all the deadlines.” For those thesising in the future, Norman offered one piece of advice: “Pick something that you really love and that you’re really interested in, and then make it work in your field if you can, because that’s what I did.”
