Suvi Saarelainen

University of Eastern Finland | UEF · School of Theology

Personal autonomy is among the core values of modern Western liberalism, but what is the precise meaning of this term, and why is autonomy valued so highly? What if one is no longer fully capable of self-determination, as may be the case as we grow old? In this article, we clarify the meaning of personal autonomy, claim that its importance is conne...

Spiritual care needs are rarely met among adolescents and young adults (AYA) whose lives have been affected by serious illness. The chapter discusses the significance of spirituality for AYAs in palliative care in the context of cancer. By reviewing the literature and introducing notions about both young adult cancer studies and more general pallia...

Background: Spiritual care constitutes an indispensable aspect of palliative care (PC). Health care professionals encounter challenges when addressing spiritual care at the end of life. Developing appropriate attitudes toward end-of-life care can facilitate the acquisition of competencies needed for effective delivery of spiritual care. Aim: To exp...

This article investigates the formation of meaningful pastoral care relationships by chaplains with older people with dementia in nursing homes. The study responds to the recently highlighted need for theological exploration of wellbeing by providing a theological analysis of how a meaningful pastoral care relationship is formed from chaplains’ per...

This study expands understanding of how existential loneliness and meaning in life might be connected in the lived experience of nursing home residents. A secondary analysis of interviews with nursing home residents (n=8) was conducted. The analysis started inductively using Template Analysis, and later deductively, where a theoretical framework gu...

In secularised Nordic cultures, more research is needed about the existential significance of COVID-19 distress. The connection between COVID-19 distress, crisis of meaning, and sources of meaning was studied using the Finnish version of Sources of Meaning and Meaning in Life (SoMe) questionnaire. The data were collected from 551 Finns. Respondents...

Background Psychological research about meaningfulness is concerned with a subjective sense of meaning of one's own life, that is, meaning in life . Empirical research in this field is attracting interest, as meaning in life has wide‐ranging positive implications for mental health and well‐being. Aim The aim of this article is to test the validity...

Yhtenä ikääntyneiden hyvän hoivan tunnusmerkkinä on pidetty asiakkaiden yksilöl-lisiin tarpeisiin vastaamista, joten myös vakaumuksellisten asioiden huo mioimisen ymmärretään kuuluvan kokonaisvaltaiseen hoitotyöhön. Tarkastelemme tutkimuk-sessamme pappien haastattelujen (n=10) pohjalta heidän työtään hoivakodeissa. Aktanttianalyysin avulla tutkimme...

Aikaisemmat tutkimukset osoittavat, että ihmisen ikä voi vaikuttaa siihen, miten hän merkityksellistää kollektiivisia kriisejä ja selviytyy niissä. Tässä laadullisessa tutkimuksessa selvitetään, millaisia merkityksiä ikäihmiset rakentavat covid-19-pandemiasta ja Venäjän hyökkäyksestä Ukrainaan kollektiivisina kriiseinä. Teema-analyysin avulla tarka...

Throughout the years some scholars have emphasised that developmental changes might influence the experience of meaning in life (MIL), especially in the case of older adults. However, so far, it is unclear whether researchers implement this developmental perspective when conceptualising MIL in late life. This scoping review aims to get insight in t...

https://julkaisut.evl.fi/catalog/Tutkimukset%20ja%20julkaisut/r/4369/viewmode=previewview

In the last decade, there has been a renewed interdisciplinary interest in the study of existential loneliness (EL) or existential isolation (EI). However, to date there is still no consensus in the literature on what exactly EL/EI is and how should be measured, resulting in a wide variety of definitions and operationalizations of the experience. T...

Background: The European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) has developed the Spiritual Well-being Questionnaire (EORTC QLQ-SWB32), a measure of spiritual well-being validated with people receiving palliative care for cancer, although its usefulness is not restricted to that population. We aimed to translate and validate thi...

The prevalence of dementia is increasing globally as populations grow older. Moderate and severe dementia are the main reasons for older people entering long-term care in Finland, and the vast majority of nursing home residents have it. Regarding mild dementia, religiousness is known to slow the progress of the disease, offer solace, and maintain a...

Yhä useampi ikääntyvä saa hoivaa ja hoitoa oman kodin ympäristössä. Viime vuosina myös kotisaattohoito on lisääntynyt merkittävästi. Tässä artikkelissa tarkastelemme relationaalisuuden ilmenemistä ikääntyvien (65+) uskonnollisissa kokemuksissa. Koska fenomenologinen lähestyminen vaatii aineiston syvällistä analyysiä ja aineiston samankaltaisuutta,...

Puolison kuolema käynnistää ikääntyneillä leskillä narratiivisen identiteetin muokkautumisen prosessin, jossa menetystarinalla ja muistoilla on iso rooli. Analysoimme puolison menetyksen aiheuttamaa muutosprosessia suhteessa ikääntyneiden (+65) narratiiviseen identiteettiin käyttäen tulkinnallista fenomenologista analyysia (IPA, ks. Smith ym., 2009...

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N = 10, 535 participants from 24 countries...

Background: The European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) has developed the Spiritual Well-being Questionnaire (EORTC QLQ-SWB32) for assessment of spirituality in palliative care for cancer. We aimed to translate and validate this tool in Finnish and to study the relationship between spirituality and quality of life (QOL)....

Bereavement is an ongoing process of negotiation and meaning-making in which widows and widowers make sense of the changed nature of their relationship with their deceased spouse. We analyzed the experiences of meaning in life among older widows and widowers (aged 65+) using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA; see Smith et al. in Interpr...

Tämä artikkeli perehtyy siihen, miten kokemus elämän merkityksellisyydestä näyttäytyi ensimmäisen korona-aallon aikana. Määrällinen tutkimusaineisto kerättiin keväällä 2020. Pääosa kyselyyn vastanneista (N = 1162) oli suomalaisia, puolalaisia, italialaisia ja espanjalaisia. Tutkimustulokset osoittavat, että kokemus elämän merkityksellisyydestä säil...

Religious or spiritual capital has been described in terms of resources provided by religious organizations, and which individuals 'purchase' through attendance, learning and commitment. The recent COVID-19 pandemic and its related experience of lockdown, loneliness and high uncertainty has offered a unique context in which the extent and effects o...

A threat to our life makes us grasp the basic value for our life, and seek the resources needed to safeguard it. Paradoxically, the COVID-19 pandemic by enforcing social distancing has brought into sharp relief the relational nature of human life, namely, the cosmotheandric experience of interdependence among the theistic, cosmic and anthropic real...

Earlier studies show that experiencing life as meaningful in old age promotes holistic wellbeing and health among older people. As more and more people are living with reduced capacities in their own homes, there is an urgent need to find new ways of promoting holistic wellbeing of the ageing population. Analysing data gathered from existential dis...

Increasingly more older people are now being cared for in their own homes. Furthermore, it has become more common that people stay at home to receive end-of-life care. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), we analyzed the religious experiences of older people (aged 65+). We answered these questions: What kind of religious experience...

Every year 90,000 young people in Europe and the USA are newly diagnosed with cancer. The majority of earlier studies have taken a quantitative perspective, rarely focusing on the importance of religiosity and spirituality. From these premises, this narrative study explores the spiritual needs of emerging adults with cancer and suggests spiritual c...

The temporal dimensions of the past, present, and future need to be examined in order to grasp an individual’s experiences of hope and despair. Images of the future provide an essential perspective on self-narratives and constitute a valuable source of information for practical theology and pastoral care. Through analysing the autobiographical stor...

A diagnosis of cancer usually arouses fear of death. It seems that patients are often left alone with their anxieties. This statement is supported by research on cancer patients conducted in Finland in 2008, which stated that cancer patients were not given the support they needed unless they were active in seeking out that support themselves. This...

In this chapter we will give examples of embodied experiences during life-threatening illness from various empirical studies conducted through the years. Through our research, we add more theoretical knowledge on hope and despair of those suffering from cancer and AIDS. We have seen a great need to formulate a relational theology in the context of...

The article provides an image of the beginning, growth, and current situation of healthcare chaplaincy in Finland. The history of the chaplaincy takes us back decades, yet the healthcare chaplaincy as we know it today was formed in the 1960s. The Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Finland has played a significant role in the development of the chaplain...

The paper aims to discover how youth at risk of becoming marginalised describe the relations between meaning, faith and belonging. The data consists of 20 individual interviews with young people living in the small rural district of Lammi in southern Finland, including the experiences of three asylum seekers. Thematic analysis of the data indicated...

For young people, the occurrence of cancer disrupts the coherence of life and disturbs hopes and dreams for the future. The aim of this research was to discover, with a narrative approach, how religion and worldview impacted the coping process of emerging adults with cancer. The data consists of life tree drawings, autobiographical interviews, blog...

The article presents empirical findings on religious, spiritual, and secular coping among emerging Finnish adults with cancer and seeks an understanding of the different meanings they constructed of their experience with cancer. Autobiographical interviews and life tree drawings of 16 emerging adults were analyzed utilizing a narrative approach. To...

Coping was expressed in terms of identity, context and practices in the life stories of 16 young adults with cancer. Religion functioned as part of the process within each of these three dimensions of coping. By utilizing K. I. Pargament’s studies of religious coping and R. Ganzevoort’s formulation of narrative religious coping, the article focuses...

This paper introduces a methodological approach that was utilized when the textual material and life tree drawings of young adults with cancer were analyzed as an interwoven ensemble. In order to take the visuals seriously, the article focuses on visual narrative analysis in order to give a clear description of how the drawings were analyzed as nar...

The aim of the research was to find out what kind of inner methods assisted during the crisis of cancer and what sort of external support was needed. The article answers to two questions: Firstly, which kind of inner designs created a positive adjustment to cancer and, secondly, what kind of external support was needed to gain a positive adaptation...

Cancer diseases are considered to be relatively common among the Finnish population, every fourth Finn has been affected by cancer in their lifetime. Around 24,000 new cases of cancer are diagnosed each year in Finland. According to the estimations, about half of all diseased will recover. This research examines cancer patients experiences and need...