Browsing by Subject "ortodoksisuus"

This qualitative research was performed by interviewing students at late stages of their studies in orthodox theology. They were asked about their conceptions of scientific and spiritual knowledge. Further it was studied how advanced were their conceptions about scientific knowledge. Advancement of these students' conceptions of knowledge were studied by way of personal epistemology research theories. According to these theories academic thinking develops through three phases. The absolutist phase of development is followed by the phase of relativism. The most developed phase is called the evaluative phase, where students commit themselves to their own viewpoints. The following questions were asked: 1) What kind of conceptions do students of orthodox theology hold about scientific knowledge? 2) How developed are the conceptions about scientific knowledge? 3) What kind of conceptions do the students have about spiritual knowledge? 4) How do scientific knowledge and spiritual knowledge differ from each other and what kind of similarities there are according to the students? Four students participated in thematic interviews. There were ten interviews altogether. Both inductive and abductive qualitative content analysis were used as the method of analysis. Abductive analysis was used for the evaluation of the evolvement of both scientific knowledge and spiritual knowledge. Nine categories with the same name but with different contents were formed from both types of knowledge. These nine categories were processed into six upper categories. Further two upper categories were formed from the six. These two upper categories express scientific and spiritual knowledge as progressive phenomena. The interviewed students considered these two categories of knowledge different in many ways. Similarity, on the other hand, was that both of them are basically based on empirical experience. The conceptions about scientific knowledge were mostly at least on a relativist level. Knowledge about spirituality was only partly measurable and the results were not convincing. The results of this research may be used in the development of the study program of orthodox theology. Further, future research in the field of university pedagogy may benefit from the viewpoints of this research.