LAUSR

We explore how people experience the sacred in their everyday lives using a recently developed research technique—smartphone-based experience sampling method (S-ESM). The primary goal of our experience-driven approach is to explore the contours and variations of spiritual awareness within people's day-to-day lives. We seek to better understand when and where spiritual awareness is likely to arise, and the contexts in which it is rare. Our smartphone-based data allow us to track the many contexts in which an awareness of the sacred occurs, as reported in real time during people's normal daily activities. We parse out how immediate contextual factors and how people's more habitual behaviors are related to their spiritual experiences. This illuminates a wide range of factors that influence spiritual experiences that have not received much scholarly attention, and enables us to connect cutting-edge quantitative methods with qualitative scholarship on spirituality. We hope this will open the door to the development of new theories of situated spiritual experience.