A Qualitative Study of Muslim Children’s Concepts of GOD

The study was aimed at developing a holistic account of Muslim children's concepts of God. The study was carried out on three Muslim children aged 6, 8 and 10 years living in the suburbs of Ontario, Canada. Detailed unstructured interviews with the help of pictures to elicit responses about Divine attributes and card sorting tasks to bring out the similarities and differences among the categories were the main techniques. The analysts of data shows that the concept of Goo is a non­spontaneous one which children develop from their encounters with adults' use of the term "God" by means of a variety of interpretive strategies including active search for a hypothesis, passive recall of previously understood information or simply parroting what adults say. No evidence was found to support a stage-theory of the acquisition of the concept of God.