Date of Award

2014

Degree Type

Dissertation

Department

Education and Human Services

First Advisor

Ingersoll, Elliot

Subject Headings

Spiritual healing, Spirituality -- Measurement, Spiritual Well-Being Scale, Spiritual Assessment Inventory, Cultural pluralism, Spiritual wellness inventory, spirituality

Abstract

The relationship between psychology and spirituality has been tenuous. Psychology distanced itself from spirituality, which could not be empirically tested, in order to establish itself as a viable science. As psychology sought this endeavor, a renewed interest in spirituality and therapy arose resulting in numerous studies exploring the effects of religion and spirituality concluding that religion and/or spirituality may provide a protective psychological factor which enhances coping skills (Johnstone et al.,2008).There has been a renewed interest regarding spirituality and therapists have realized the importance of identifying a client's spiritual outlook or lack thereof in care planning and treatment of clients (Stanard et al., 2000). In order to appropriately address spirituality, assessments are helpful forinformation gathering about clients. To date there are a number of assessments claiming to assess spirituality that show acceptable validity and reliability (Slater et al., 2001 Young et al., 2009). However, a majority of these assessments focus on one of the largest religious groups in the United States, Christians (Hill & Pargament, 2003) thereby eliminating individuals with non-Christian spiritual or religious identities. Spiritual assessments should take into account cultural diversity to assess spiritual wellness as the world becomes more diverse professionals are called to be cognizant of its importance. The Spiritual Wellness Inventory (Ingersoll, 1995) was proposed to take intoaccount cultural diversity with the goal of assessing spirituality across all cultural domains. The SWI also purposes to address many limitations of previous assessments however, its reliability and validity have not been studied. This quantitative study tested the reliability and validity of the SWI. This study surveyed roughly 500 respondents using Survey Monkey via email with three spiritual assessments - The Spiritual Wellbeing Scale (Paloutzian & Ellison, 1982), The Spiritual Assessment Inventory (Hall & E

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