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Advanced Methodologies in the Scientific Study of Religion and Spirituality
Abstract
During much of the twentieth century, social scientists were predicting that religions would gradually diminish and disappear with the spread of science, education, and economic growth. Instead, we have witnessed a global revival of religious movements, a source of both hope and concern in the twenty-first century. Alongside this trend, the last decade saw a resurgence of interest in the scientific study of religious and spiritual phenomena among researchers in diverse fields. Psychology, sociology, and anthropology still play central roles in such studies, but these disciplines are now supplemented by economics, epidemiology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and behavioral genetics, among others.
The eight contributors to this volume have brought to bear an enormous range of expertise and insight from several scholarly arenas. These pioneering thinkers propose new ways of pursuing the scientific study of religious and spiritual phenomena and present reseach that is increasingly suggestive of a profound and critical role for spirituality and religion in promoting human health and wellbeing. The essays within not only promote innovative reseach methodologies, but also develop creative insights into the forces that positively shape and expand world religions and their conceptualization of the sacred. Seasoned social scientists and their students will find much in this collection to provoke new questions and new methods for studying and understanding this enduring dimension of human life.
... The FACIT-sp was chosen as a measure of spiritual wellbeing because it is widely used and validated and we wanted to be able to examine our findings in the context of the existing literature. It has been suggested that a common problem in spiritual wellbeing and health research is that some instruments conflate psychological and spiritual variables, as well as often lack clarity distinguishing spiritual versus religious concepts (Hufford 2010). It is not always clear in the literature how such overlapping components of psychological health with spiritual wellbeing are determined. ...
Depression adversely predicts prognosis in individuals with symptomatic heart failure. In some clinical populations, spiritual wellness is considered to be a protective factor against depressive symptoms. This study examined associations among depressive symptoms, spiritual wellbeing, sleep, fatigue, functional capacity, and inflammatory biomarkers in 132 men and women with asymptomatic stage B heart failure (age 66.5 years ± 10.5). Approximately 32 % of the patients scored ≥10 on the Beck Depression Inventory, indicating potentially clinically relevant depressive symptoms. Multiple regression analysis predicting fewer depressive symptoms included the following significant variables: a lower inflammatory score comprised of disease-relevant biomarkers (p < 0.02), less fatigue (p < 0.001), better sleep (p < 0.04), and more spiritual wellbeing (p < 0.01) (overall model F = 26.6, p < 0.001, adjusted R square = 0.629). Further analyses indicated that the meaning (p < 0.01) and peace (p < 0.01) subscales, but not the faith (p = 0.332) subscale, of spiritual wellbeing were independently associated with fewer depressive symptoms. Interventions aimed at increasing spiritual wellbeing in patients lives, and specifically meaning and peace, may be a potential treatment target for depressive symptoms asymptomatic heart failure.
... In recent decades, a plethora of articles concerning the relationship between spirituality and health, including mindfulness, have been published. The relationship between spiritual involvement and health outcomes has been reviewed in detail [1][2][3]. Although some disagree [4], most authors report a positive relationship between spiritual commitment and mental and physical health in up to 84% of studies which included a spirituality related measure [2,5,6]. ...
To identify and compare the concepts contained in questionnaires measuring mindfulness using the International Classification of Functioning (ICF) as external reference.
Questionnaires which are published in peer-reviewed journals and listed in Pubmed or PsycInfo were included. The questionnaires were analysed and, using a content-analytical approach, the respective items were categorised and linked to the ICF.
Ten questionnaires were included. Ninety-four per cent (N = 341) of the concepts could be linked to 37 different ICF categories. One hundred and seventy-one (50.1%) concepts were linked to ICF categories of the component Body Function, 74 (21.7%) to categories of the component Activity and Participation and none to categories of the component Environmental Factors. In total, 28.2% of the linked concepts belonged to Personal factors, which are not yet classified in the ICF. The questionnaires exhibited considerable differences regarding content density (i.e. the average number of concepts per item) and content diversity (i.e. the number of ICF categories per concept).
The ICF provides an useful external reference to identify and compare the concepts contained in mindfulness questionnaires. Also, mindfulness questionnaire concepts suggest potentially useful factors for classification within the ICF.
Medical practices that reside outside the mainstream medical structures have existed for centuries, often waxing and waning in prominence and use for various reasons. Recently, there has been a resurgence in interest and use of such practices in the USA generally referred to under the label of 'complementary and alternative medicine' (CAM). In this article we summarize some of the highlight events that punctuated this resurgence over the last 20 years. As in the past, social forces affecting these trends circulate around power, resources, and scope of practice. However, a prominent feature of this dynamic is a discussion about the role of science and 'evidence-based medicine' in addressing pluralistic healthcare-related practices. In the early years of this period, attempts to formulate the place of CAM practices as they relate to epistemology, nonconventional assumptions about health and healing, and the complexity of understanding 'whole systems' were discussed and often examined. Less attention is being paid to those core assumptions in more recent times. The focus now seems to be on how CAM practices can be judiciously and effectively 'integrated' into mainstream medicine. Examples of how this dynamic is evolving are described.
Religion in Mind is a 2001 text which summarizes and extends the advances in the cognitive study of religion throughout the 1990s. It uses empirical research from psychology and anthropology to illuminate various components of religious belief, ritual, and experience. The book examines cognitive dimensions of religion within a naturalistic view of culture, while respecting the phenomenology of religion and drawing together teachers of religion, psychologists of religion, and cognitive scientists. Expert contributors focus on phenomena such as belief-fixation and transmission; attributions of agency; anthropomorphizing; counterintuitive religious representations; the well-formedness of religious rituals; links between religious representations and emotions; and the development of god concepts. The work encourages greater interdisciplinary linkages between scholars from different fields and will be of interest to researchers in anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, and cognitive science. It also will interest more general readers in religion and science.
Research on intrinsic and extrinsic religion has been troubled by conceptual diffuseness and questionable scale validity. Hunt and King have proposed greater specificity in conceptualization and measurement in future work. This paper attempts to specify and measure a single crucial dimension identified by Hunt and King, namely ultimate versus instrumental religious motivation. Two validation studies were done utilizing persons nominated by ministers as having either ultimate (intrinsic) or instrumental (extrinsic) religious motivation. A new 10-item Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale is proposed, and measurement problems are discussed.
This study was an examination of the proposition that religiosity and spirituality are inversely associated with personal distress. Data for this study were drawn from a broader anonymous survey of 282 upper division students from a broad range of majors in a sociology class at a comprehensive western public university. Gender of respondents was 52% female, 48% male. The median age was 21 with a range of 18 to 55. Single-item questions were used to measure religiosity and spirituality variables. The 50-item Distress Symptom Scale was used to measure personal distress. In acknowledgment of the complexity of the religious experience, a number of specific hypotheses were explored. Findings were mixed, with importance of religion showing a positive association, belief in the existence of God a curvilinear relationship, and having a sense of meaning and direction an inverse association with personal distress. Other religiosity and spirituality variables yielded no significant associations with personal distress, although several were weakly related in the direction opposite that predicted. The association of sense of meaning and direction with other religiosity and spirituality factors is also described. A number of interpretations and caveats are suggested.