Clarifying the Relation Between Spirituality and Well-Being

Abstract

Koenig (J Nerv Ment Dis 196:349-355, 2008) and others have asserted that measures of spirituality used to investigate its association with health seem to present a misleading picture of the relationship because of evidence suggesting that spirituality has become conceptually confounded with well-being. To evaluate this claim, the present study used a sample of 247 university students to explore the relation of a multidimensional model of spirituality with several different forms of well-being and the association of both with a two-factor model of social desirability. Correlational and regression analyses revealed that, although there is some evidence of an association, it is generally of low effect size and seems to differ as a function of how spirituality is defined. More importantly, however, there was the finding that existential well-being, a concept often incorporated into definitions of spirituality and a part of the measurement model used in this study, is virtually uncorrelated with explicitly spiritual and religious variables but shows a pattern of association with measures of well-being and social desirability, which suggests that it would be better conceptualized as a form of well-being and not spirituality. The article concludes with a discussion of the meaning of the findings for understanding the spirituality-health literature and suggestions for future research.

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“…Correlations between the ESI-R dimensions and the SPWB are very similar to what has been found in other studies (e.g., Migdal & MacDonald, 2013), with EWB obtaining significant moderate-to-strong correlations with all six SPWB subscales. Outside of this, COS was found to correlate significantly with SPWB Self-Acceptance (r = .15, p <.01), Personal Growth (r = .25, p <.001), and Purpose in Life (r = .14, p <.01).…”

“…Since the instrument has been found to have good psychometric properties with other cultural samples, we expected the ESI-R to show the same with a Spanish sample. Second, we were interested in seeing if we could replicate published empirical findings with the ESI-R with regard to its associations to age, sex, personality, well-being, and psychopathology (MacDonald, 2000a;MacDonald et al, 2015;MacDonald & Holland, 2003;Mendez & MacDonald, 2012;Migdal & MacDonald, 2013). The available research generally indicates that one or more of MacDonald's (2000aMacDonald's ( , 2000b dimensions (a) show modest but positive associations with age, (b) are linked with sex such that women tend to get higher scores (especially on REL, followed by COS and PAR), (c) are related to personality traits in the well-known MacDonald's (2000a) five dimensional model of spirituality.…”

“…Expressions of Spirituality Inventory (Spanish) (Koenig, 2008;Migdal & MacDonald, 2013). As a last example, there have been burgeoning concerns regarding the universality of spirituality as some scholars argue that it is a concept that is intrinsically bound to culture.…”

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“…There are other reasons, however, why EWB was a candidate for exclusion. These reasons include (a) MacDonald (2000b) did not find a higher order EWB factor in his original study, (b) there have been questions raised regarding the appropriateness of incorporating any well-being concepts within measures of spirituality (including the ESI-R) as it results in a confounding of the two constructs which undermines the usability of spirituality measures in health research (Koenig, 2008;Migdal & MacDonald, 2013), and (c) other than one PAR item, the EWB items are the only ones on the ESI-R which are reverse scored and use more negative phrasing. Not only is it more challenging to effectively translate negatively worded items from one language to another, research has suggested that the inclusion of such items on a test which otherwise uses positively phrased items runs the risk compromising the quality of measurement (e.g., Roszkowski & Soven, 2010).…”

Spiritual wellbeing predicting depression: Is it relevant?

“…They state in their Introduction that ''R/S wellness is of increasing interest in the medical literature and may protect against depressive symptoms'', which suggests causality. We do not understand why the authors used the concept of spiritual wellbeing (SWB) to predict wellbeing, given the warnings against this practice in several earlier publications (Koenig, 2008;Visser et al, 2010;Migdal & MacDonald, 2013).…”