Dimensions of Religion/Spirituality and Relevance to Health Research

Abstract

This study aimed to identify unique religion/ spirituality (R/S) factors that account for variation in R/S measures of interest to health research. A 127-item questionnaire that included R/S items from classic, personality, clinical, and recent R/S-health research was administered to California state college students (n = 846) and to members of two California churches (n = 425). A seven-factor solution emerged that explained 61.5% of total variance that replicated across independent samples and that was highly stable across diverse subgroups. A large primary factor (28% of explained variance) included a number of key R/S measures assessing R/S motivation, devotion, and coping. Six other factors, each accounting for 6% to 9%, supported the discriminant validity of social support, existential well-being, extrinsic motivation, religious proscription, and two personality factors (spiritual and self transcendence). The link between current results and literature on health is discussed in terms of current causal models.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.