Freedom to flourish?: Using psychological self-determination theory to investigate an innovative programme supporting women’s doctoral research in theology

This paper will detail the context and findings of exploratory research investigating how women undertaking doctoral research in theology characterise the impact on their flourishing of a holistic project which supports and explicitly addresses the intersectionality of their academic, spiritual and personal lives.

For several decades women theologians have been exposing how the exclusion, marginalisation and oppression of female voices and lived experiences, in the academy and in faith communities, has impeded our freedom to flourish: we have been denied access to life abundant (John 10:10)—academically, spiritually and personally.

Unsurprisingly, when contemporary women are granted admittance to doctoral level theological study, our research emerges from where the realities of our lives collide—and often painfully conflict—with the institutions, teachings, texts and practices of our faith traditions: it addresses subjects that challenge the praxis of faith communities and the theological status quo. Many women undertaking theology PhDs position themselves as either feminist theologians (or within other distinct, global, female theologies), as practical theologians, or at the intersection of these approaches, both of which wrestle with their tangential position to fields considered to inhabit academic theology’s centre ground. Additionally, a significant proportion employ existing or generate bespoke qualitative methods within the research process, and increasingly incorporate creative practice outputs within their thesis submissions. All these factors underscore women’s alterity from the androcentric norms foregrounded in theology, and academia more generally, contributing to perceptions—of others, and their own—that many women inhabit a precarious place in the academy. 

This context led to the author’s development of the Doctoral Support Project (DSP), a programme for women theological students, now in its third year. The DSP aims to support participants’ holistic flourishing by establishing ‘safe-enough’ (Glasson, 2009) relational spaces to intentionally explore the intersectionality of their lived experiences, their theological research, and shifts in faith occurring during their PhD. Each year, each participant accesses up to 12 hours one-to-one support—with a facilitator who holds a theology PhD and is also an experienced spiritual director and therapist—and attends five Peer Support Group meetings with three other DSP participants. Acknowledging that women’s religious practices and areas of research arise from and feed back into our spiritual and ethical lives (Slee, 2013), the DSP explicitly construes the processes of theological research—those undertaken by participants in the DSP, the DSP itself, and research into it—in essentially spiritual or religious terms: as spiritual practice that ‘is a spiritual landscape every bit as much as it is an intellectual or professional one’ (Slee, 2013: 16).

The DSP is currently being evaluated through the lens of Self Determination Theory (SDT), an approach originating in empirical psychology (Deci and Ryan, 1985; 2017), as part of a wider John Templeton Foundation funded programme in psychology-engaged theology. 

Freedom to think and act volitionally in ways consistent with deeply held values that are inherently integrated into self is a motivational freedom that SDT portrays as essential for human flourishing. Spanning the continuum from psychological dysfunction to well-being, SDT articulates an empirically driven, organismic motivational meta-theory that terms intrinsic, volitional freedom as ‘autonomous motivation’, contrasting this with externally driven ‘controlled motivation’, where behaviours are rooted in pressures and expectations from others (Deci and Ryan, 2015). Its propositions address how social and cultural factors undermine or facilitate volition and initiative, along with an individual’s quality of performance and subjective well-being. SDT’s theories and amassed research findings strongly suggest that the position of female doctoral students described above will thwart, rather than support, the development of what it posits as three essential ‘nutriments’ of psychological health and well-being fundamental to the freedoms of autonomous motivation: autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Although SDT originated in the mid-1980s, and its extensive research literature has generated six sub-theories of development and personality, even practical theologians—whose shared concern for lived human experience has fostered a dynamic and evolving relationship with psychology—have engaged only minimally with its insights, whilst feminist theologians—whose examinations of women’s lives extensively explore themes central to SDT—seem to have barely encountered its scholarship.

Historically, Christianity has viewed many forms of writing as spiritual practice—from illuminated Medieval manuscripts to theological reflection in the late 20th Century. This millennium female theologians began explicitly naming and interrogating feminist qualitative research methods and processes for studying women’s and girls’ faith lives as spiritual practice (Moschella, 2008; Flanagan, 2014; Sexton, 2019; Woolley, 2019): ‘The research journey itself, then, is a kind of pascal process into which we enter … losing and finding ourselves countless times in the messy, confusing, uncertain process of research’ (Slee, 2013: 24). More recently, female trauma theologians have identified the (re)traumatisation of researchers through research processes, emphasising the need for researchers and readers of their publications to exercise appropriate self-care (O’Donnell & Cross, 2020). Despite these epistemological shifts, potential ‘gaps’ between academic theologians’ beliefs and institutional practices regarding responsibility for the spiritual and personal well-being of theology students resulting from their engagement in doctoral research remains unarticulated (Pauw, in Volf & Bass, 2002).

Framed within the contexts above, this paper will present findings from exploratory research utilising the theories and measures of SDT to inform its investigation of how DSP participants characterise the programme’s impact upon their freedom to flourish academically, spiritually and personally during their PhD. Qualitative data is elicited using three methods: personal reflections comprising free-text responses to specifically devised questions about the DSP’s supporting or thwarting of BPNT’s three basic psychological needs; recorded conversations between pairs of DSP participants in July 2024; and end-of-year DSP Evaluation Forms from July 2023 and 2024. Quantitative data is gathered using two well-validated scales: the General Causality Orientations Scale (Deci and Ryan, 1985) identifies between three different trait-like motivational orientations within individuals; and a context-specific adaptation of the Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale, 3.2.1.4 ‘Work’ (Olafsen, Halvari and Frølund, 2021) measures participants’ experience of this within the DSP. A discussion of the findings will additionally identify insights and questions that emerge by bringing BPNT’s ‘nutriments’ of autonomy, competence and relatedness into conversation with feminist theology’s ongoing discourses around women’s pursuit of self-authenticity, agency and relationality.