Concerns About Measuring “Spirituality” in Research

By H. Koenig. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 2008

632 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/70cf4b5ad843ceec73ee53de91072a118a40ca6e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Applied Psychology

1. J. Fisher
2. Grieteke Pool
3. A. Visser
4. B. Garssen
5. N. Fagley
6. Laurence J. Kirmayer
7. Mitchel Adler
8. Jack T. Huber

In Clinical Psychology

1. J. Fisher
2. Jack T. Huber
3. Grieteke Pool
4. A. Visser
5. B. Garssen
6. Laurence J. Kirmayer
7. A. Büssing
8. N. Fagley

In Health

1. J. Fisher
2. Laurence J. Kirmayer
3. A. Büssing
4. C. Klein
5. C. Zwingmann
6. Grieteke Pool
7. A. Visser
8. B. Garssen

Citations in the corpus

• Community Resilience: Models, Metaphors and Measures (2009, background): “There are difficulties in assessing spirituality in general because the term covers an increasingly broad array of meanings (Koenig, 2008).”
• Religion, Spirituality, and Health: The Research and Clinical Implications (2012, background): “For an in depth discussion, including an exploration of contamination and confounding in the measurement of spirituality, I refer the reader to other sources [18–20].”
• Development and Application of a Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire Called SHALOM (2010, methodology): “Nevertheless, the SWBS had been used in 182 studies by 2007 [26].”
• Does Spirituality or Religion Positively Affect Mental Health? Meta-analysis of Longitudinal Studies (2020, methodology): “…that used a questionable R/S scale, especially R/S measures that are confounded with well-being (Garssen, Visser, & de Jager Meezenbroek, 2016; Koenig, 2008; Migdal & MacDonald, 2013), and 4) using association measures, such as regression coefficients, from which confounding effects have been…”
• Appreciation: a spiritual path to finding value and meaning in the workplace (2012, background): “According to Koenig (2008), the “traditional-historical” view of spirituality is that it is a characteristic of “a subset of deeply religious people who have dedicated their lives to the service of their religion and to their fellow human[s], and whose lives exemplify the teachings of their faith…”
• An Investigation of the Relations Between Altruism, Empathy, and Spirituality (2012, background): “In fact, problems with conceptualization are so rampant that some recognized authorities in the field of religion and health have called into question the very value of studying spirituality at all (e.g., H. G. Koenig, 2008).”
• Differing Pathways between Religiousness, Spirituality, and Health: A Self-Regulation Perspective (2014, background): “Comparison of the Models The similarities among and differences between these models are illustrative of the “dishevelment” (Krause, 2011) in the literature bemoaned by many luminaries in the field, including most of those whose proposed models we hav reviewed.”
• Measuring Religiosity/Spirituality: Theoretical Differentiations and Categorization of Instruments (2011, background): “” Spirituality can then be found through religious engagement, through an individual experience of the divine, and/or through a connection to nature [62].”
• The empirical and conceptual value of the spiritual transcendence and religious involvement scales for personality research. (2009, background): “Musick, Traphagan, Koenig, and Larson (2000) have noted that in samples of adults, these two terms are highly related to one another; over 88% rated themselves as being average to high on both spirituality and religiousness.”