Fenomenologia da Experiência e do Comportamento Religioso em Jovens Universitários.

Abstract

The object of this dissertation is the study of the religious behaviour of the young people of a university in the interior of Goiás: Rio Verde. At first, we thought that at least 5% of those students might be atheists, based, theoretically, on studies realized in foreing universities, since no such study exists as far as brazilian universities are concerned. For this reason, the author of the dissertation decided to describe and analyze this type of behaviour amog the univesity students. However, after conducting the survey, it was verified that no university student in Rio Verde denies the existence of God; on the contrary, more than 50% of the university students are living with an iitense religious experience, although a consideral number of them are very much secularized. The conclusion of this work proposes a dialogue with the university to show the importance of this type of experience for social inegration and the equilibrium of the human personality. The survey is descriptive and analitical, and pretends to the be the first of a series of studies on the behaviour of university students in the state of Goiás. The candidate for a master’s degree elaborated a questionnaire with questions that have either open ended or multiple choice answers. The open ended questions were useful for a deeper investigation of the subjective descriptions of theses experiences. The example that is used is not an accidental probability, since the data was obtained from university students who presented themselves voluntarily. After being tabulated and cross checked, the data was analysed from a phenomenological perspective since this methodology, besides allowing for extensive descriptions, proposes to understand the phenomenon.