‘Non-duality’ and ‘Reliance’ are the ‘regression refined principal components’ that influences ‘spirituality’ in ‘Indian Saints’.

Abstract

Background: Quantifying spirituality is a tough ordeal and pretty intricate considering its multidimensional nature. Religion and culture are its top exponents. An evaluating tool must envisage them as core components. A tool to measure spirituality by incorporating Hindu philosophy was hard to find. Thus, we choose the commonly studied SAI (Spiritual Assessment Inventory) questionnaire and attempted to extract refined components with significant predicting potentials which can pave the path for spiritual assessment among Indian Saints.Results: The legitimate KMO and Bartlett's Test of significance of SAI for 1103 participants were .878 and 0.000; its Cronbach’s α was .810. Extracted Communalities for all 54 items of SAI ranged from .404 to .709. PCA (Principal Component Analysis) analysed 1097 participants that yielded 2 Principal Components (PCs)having a total of 7 variables; 3 for PC 1 and 4 for PC 2. The PCs thus derived explained 59.48% of the total variance of the participant’s spiritual score. The PCA for the two extracted components reported a Cronbach's α value of .69, the KMO and Bartlett's Test of significance of .748 and 0.000, and a linear regression R2 value at .605, F .000 and sig. f change .000. Standardized Beta for extracted component variables ranged from.10 to .28 with a significance value of .000. Both the PCs had corresponding Eigenvalues > 1. The corresponding Monte Carlo PCA test of parallel lines Eigenvalues was calculated to cross-check the PCA Eigen figure for their validity. The PCA Eigen figure was found tenable after cross-checking.Conclusion: PC 1 with its 3 variables was named ‘Reliance’ and PC 2 with 4 variables were ‘Non-duality’ named. These two PCs accounted for to 59.48%of spirituality in Indian saints and demonstrated a strong positive prediction potential concerning spiritual scores (regression R2 .605) in Indian Saints.