Daily spiritual experiences and well-being among the nonreligious, spiritual, and religious: A bifactor analysis.

Abstract

The Daily Spiritual Experiences Scale (DSES;Underwood & Teresi, 2002) has been used in hundreds of investigations to study the role of everyday spiritual experiences in the lives of the Not Religious nor Spiritual (NRS), Spiritual but Not Religious (SNR), and Religious and Spiritual (RS). However, there is a lack of measurement equivalence/invariance (ME/I) evidence to support the use of the DSES to compare these three groups. The present study (N = 1623 U.S. adults) sought to (a) identify the most appropriate factor structure for the DSES within samples of NRS, SNR, and RS persons, (b) examine the ME/I of the DSES factor(s) across the three groups, and (c) investigate the relationship between the DSES and common measures of wellbeing (e.g., meaning in life, satisfaction with life, physical health, and mental health). Our results indicate that the DSES measured the same two independent daily spiritual experience constructs when used with SNR and RS participants, but a different array of inadequatelydefined daily spiritual experience constructs among the NRS participants. This raises questions about the utility of using the DSES with NRS samples, and provides evidence that the DSES conforms to a bifactor, rather than unidimensional, structure among SNR and RS participants.Lastly, our findings paint a complex picture of the relationship between daily spiritual experiences and well-being across these three groups, such that daily spiritual experiences are not always associated with enhanced well-being. Implications for research and practice use, scoring, and interpretation of the DSES across these three groups is discussed.

Valid assessment of spiritual quality of life with the WHOQOL-SRPB BREF across religious, spiritual, and secular persons: A psychometric study.

“…We used Full Information Maximum Likelihood (FIML) estimation in Mplus for all model analyses to handle missing data. To sort participants into the three worldview groups of interest, we followed the precedent of Hammer and Cragun (2019), Streib andHood (2016), andZinnbauer et al (1997). First, the neither religious nor spiritual (NRS) group included 488 participants who indicated both "not religious at all" and "not spiritual at all" on the Religiousness and Spiritu-ality items (see Measures section).…”

“…For example, for someone who does not believe in the existence of a higher power, faith may be irrelevant to providing comfort in daily life. Given that past research has documented that certain spirituality constructs (e.g., daily spiritual experiences; Hammer & Cragun, 2019) were not associated with enhanced well-being among NRS and SNR persons, we sought to determine if this was the case with SQOL. If SQOL’s relationship with well-being was found to be dependent on group membership, this would caution researchers and practitioners against conceptualizing SQOL, by definition, as healthy for all humans.…”

Christian therapists and their clients.

“…Other aspects of religiousness and spirituality—such as daily spiritual experiences and forgiveness—are also associated with clients’ overall functioning. Among religious adults, daily spiritual experiences are associated with well-being (Hammer & Cragun, 2019) and higher baseline daily spiritual experiences are predictive of better outcomes in religiously oriented cognitive–behavioral therapy (Koenig, Pearce, Nelson, & Erkanli, 2016). Along with service attendance, prayer, and positive religious coping, highly religious adults also report more daily spiritual experiences than those who identify as moderately, somewhat or minimally religious (Park et al, 2013).…”

A eudaimonic perspective on prejudice and female workers’ psychological well-being

“…Scholarship on psychological well-being (PWB) is generally grounded in Western theories and settings (Duckitt, 1992; Hershcovis and Barling, 2010; Joshanloo and Niknam, 2019; Ryff, 1989; Viot and Benraiss-Noailles, 2019). Scholars (Hammer and Cragun, 2019; Hashemi et al , 2019; Milliman et al , 2017; Park et al , 2018) have called for further empirical and theoretical studies to offer contextual awareness and nuanced understanding of workers’ psychological well-being. The present study seeks to address this gap.…”