Compare methods

	Conversion Narrative Analysis	Phenomenology of Religion
Field	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1993	1957
Originator	Lewis R. Rambo	Gerardus van der Leeuw; Mircea Eliade; Rudolf Otto
Type	Qualitative narrative analysis with stage model	Interpretive-comparative descriptive method
Seminal source	Rambo, L. R. (1993). Understanding Religious Conversion. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN: 9780300065152	Eliade, M. (1957/1959). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (trans. W. R. Trask). New York: Harcourt, Brace. ISBN: 9780156792011
Aliases	Conversion Story Analysis, Religious Conversion Narrative Coding, Testimony Analysis, Conversion Stage Analysis	Religious Phenomenology, Comparative Phenomenology of the Sacred, Eidetic Method in Religion, Study of Hierophanies
Related	3	3
Summary	Conversion narrative analysis is a qualitative method for studying how people tell the story of becoming religious, changing faith, or intensifying commitment. Its leading framework is Lewis Rambo's Understanding Religious Conversion (1993), which treats conversion not as a single sudden event but as a process unfolding through interacting stages - context, crisis, quest, encounter, interaction, commitment, and consequences - shaped by personal, cultural, social, and religious forces. The method collects first-person accounts (interviews, testimonies, autobiographies), segments them into narrative units, codes them for stages, turning points, and rhetorical patterns, and interprets how converts retrospectively reconstruct their biography to make sense of the change. It is used across the psychology, sociology, and history of religion to analyze both the social process of conversion and the storytelling through which converts present a transformed self.	Phenomenology of religion is an interpretive, comparative method that seeks to describe religious phenomena as they appear to believers and to discern their essential structures, while bracketing questions of whether the beliefs are true. Developed by scholars such as Gerardus van der Leeuw and Rudolf Otto and given its most influential expression by Mircea Eliade - notably in The Sacred and the Profane (1957) - it proceeds through epoché (the suspension of judgment about truth and causal explanation), empathetic description of the phenomenon from within, and eidetic vision, the search for the invariant essence behind diverse instances. Eliade's central concept is the hierophany, the manifestation of the sacred in the profane, and the method assembles such manifestations across traditions - sacred space, sacred time, symbols of the center - into a comparative typology of the forms in which the sacred reveals itself.