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The Aitheros Research Association:
The Definitions Project: A Definitional Content Analysis of Spirituality, Religiosity, Faith, and the Sacred in the Mental Health Counseling Literature
One of the projects that the Aitheros Research Association has undertaken is a research project whose purpose is to determine how psychologists define four concepts: spirituality, religiousness, faith, and the sacred. Psychological researchers define these constructs in many different ways, and often interchangeably. There are almost as many definitions of spirituality and religiousness as there are researchers who write about them, yet they are all talking about the same concepts, so their definitions must have some elements in common. Also, spirituality is sometimes used interchangeably with the terms religiousness and faith, yet different terms exist, and many researchers make distinctions between these constructs. Therefore, some clarification is in order. What do psychologists mean when they write about spirituality? About religiosity or religiousness? And about faith? Also, the word sacred is often used in defining spirituality and religiousness; where does that concept fit in to all of this?
Harris (2003) conducted a preliminary examination of a few dozen articles and found that researchers talk about spirituality as having to do with one or more of eight different things: (1) an internal quality, (2) a belief system, (3) a relationship, (4) an ultimate concern, (5) meaningfulness, (6) self-enhancement, (7) self-transcendence, and (8) monism (seeing everything as being part of the same whole -- a type of relationship with an ultimate concern). The figure below shows the number of surveyed articles discussing each element of spirituality:
Harris (2003) also did a preliminary examination of these same articles looking for how they defined the construct of religiousness (or religiosity). Harris found that researchers talk about religiousness as having to do with one or more of six things: (1) spirituality, (2) an intrinsic nature, (3) an extrinsic nature, (4) ritual behavior, (5) institutionalization, and (6) codification. The figure below shows the number of surveyed articles discussing each element of religiousness:
Harris's (2003) Essay -- Spirituality and Religiousness: Defining Concepts in Psychotherapy
Finally, Harris (2004) conducted a more general literature review of psychology and related fields for how researchers are defining religious and spiritual constructs. This review surveyed the research literature, compared existing definitions, conceptualizations, and operationalizations of the constructs of religiousness, spirituality, and faith, and looked for a consensus. It then proposed working definitions for the constructs of spirituality and religiousness. In essence, this was a language game. The goal here was not to define these ambiguous and overlapping concepts, but to arrive at working definitions that researchers are already using, for the dual purpose of promoting further research and providing multiculturally competent care to clients from a wide variety of backgrounds. According to Harris:
Spirituality is a search for the sacred.
Religiousness is a search for the sacred (or non-sacred things) in a socially-sanctioned context that typically facilitates searches for the sacred.
Faith is a form of spirituality or religiousness.
where
The Sacred is an ultimate, transcendent, or divine being, reality, or truth as perceived by an individual.
The figure below shows these constructs and their relationship to one another:
These working definitions were proposed as “a set of criteria for judging the value of existing operational definitions of religion and spirituality” (Hill et al., 2000, p. 71; cited in Harris, 2004). Harris called for future research on defining religious and spiritual concepts in psychology to compare his working definitions of spirituality and religiousness with those that appear in the research literature. More specifically, he called for a content analysis that focuses on assessment instruments and concept mapping studies published as articles in peer-reviewed journals within the psychology and counseling research literatures.
The Aitheros Research Association is currently conducting a content analysis of the mental health research literature to extend Harris’s (2003, 2004) preliminary examinations and examine how the mental health research literature defines spirituality, religiousness, faith, and the sacred. Our goal was twofold. First, we wanted to examine the literature in depth, using a thorough qualitative method of content analysis. To achieve this, we used an innovative qualitative procedure developed specifically for this study, which we termed definitional content analysis. Content analyses of the definitional research on religion and spirituality have been done before (c.f., Hill et al., 2000; McKinnon, 2001; Scott, 1997), so our second goal was to perform a more comprehensive analysis by using a representative sample of the entire population of peer-reviewed journal articles on faith and mental health. Here, the definitional discourse on religion and spirituality is approached as a language game of definitional discourse (c.f., Wittgenstein, 1968), which looks for family resemblances among spiritual and religious concepts – not tracing “the outline of the thing’s nature,” but instead tracing “round the frame through which we look at it” (McKinnon, 2002, p. 67).
“The Definitions Project” used a qualitative procedure which we termed definitional content analysis. This methodology was developed by the authors specifically for this study, but based extensively on narrative analysis (Patton, 2002), grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), and Consensual Qualitative Research (Hill, Thompson, & Williams, 1997). First, we took a random sample of 200 articles from our research library, and our primary research team pulled direct quotes from these articles on how they defined the terms spirituality, religiosity, faith, and the sacred. As an internal consistency check, each article was assigned to two team members, who each pulled quotes separately from the article. For each article, the two team members’ quote lists were compared, and if the two lists differed by three or more quotes, the article was assigned to a third person, who also pulled quotes from it. Then, all the quotes for each term were compiled, and six members of the team grouped those quotes into categories based on commonalities in the definitions. After that, the team as a whole compiled each of the categories and argued to consensus until we arrived at a common set of categories. Next, we took an additional random sample of 50 new articles from our reference list and followed the same procedure, pulling quotes from the articles, individually grouping those quotes into our existing categories, creating new categories as appropriate, and arguing to consensus until we arrived at a common set of categories. We continued this sample procedure, sampling 50 articles at a time, until subsequent samplings yielded no new categories. We ultimately ended up with a sample of 350 articles.
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_______________________________________________________________________________
Aitheros Research Association Home * The Aitheros Project * About the Association
The Aitheros Research Library * The Definitions Project * The Construct Validity Project
The Clinical Judgment Project * The CQR Project * The Pagan Project * Contributors
_______________________________________________________________________________