Spirituality Of College Students: Definition, Structure And Measurement

Spirituality is a core concept of Western psychology of religion,and also a fundamental variable in exploring the relationship between religious beliefs and mental health.Cultural and academic background difference has been found significantly between domestic and international understanding of spirituality.In China,the empirical study on spirituality was only in the starting stage,and there was no Chinese spirituality measurement tool.Therefore,to study the basic theory of spirituality,to clarify its definition and structure elements,and to develop a measurement tool with samples of college students would be very important not only to Chinese mental health education but also to international psychology of religion.This study proposed the definition and structure model of spirituality by analyzing literature,developed Spirituality Scale for College Students (SSCS)by combing the open interview and quantitative study,and discussed the current situation and influencing factors of spirituality of 930 college students from Zhejiang and Jiangxi provinces.The main results were as follows:(1)Spirituality is a concept having close relationship with religiosity. It is a comprehensive summarize of the unique characteristics of individual personality on non-traditional religion believers and common people,which relates to the secularization of religious belief.The four elements of spirituality are "divinity belief","transcend experience", "morality pursuit" and "open participation".Here,divinity belief refers to the individual firmly believes that there are some higher beings living in the reality and in the unknown world connected with imagination.It is the cognitive factor of spirituality.Transcend experience refers to the individual has experienced the immense power of some supernatural forces,and has the experience of communicating with such power.It is the emotional factor of spirituality.Morality pursuit refers to the individual takes the ideal virtues of human beings as his moral standard and ultimate goal to pursuit.It is the personality dynamic factor of spirituality.Open participation refers to the individual is unwilling to accept the constraint of traditional religion;he wants to show the freedom and openness in religious activities.It is the willing and behavior factor of spirituality.(2)SSCS has 21 items,among them,each of divinity worship subscale,transcend experience subscale and morality pursuit subscale consists of 6 items,and open participation subscale consists of 3 items. Results of the confirmatory factor analysis suggested the construct validity of SSCS was good.The main fit indexes of modified model were as follows:x~2/df=2.91,CFI=0.95,NNFI=0.94,NFI=0.92,RMSEA=0.080, and SRMR=0.064.A significant positive correlation was found between SSCS and the importance of a higher being subscale of Miller's Measurement of Spirituality-Revised(r=0.647,p＜0.01).The internal consistency and 7-week test-retest reliability of SSCS were 0.890 and 0.862 respectively.(3)Norm in a small range was made,and the T score was used,of which,the mean score was 50,and the standard deviation was 10.The T scores above 60 were high,below 40 were low.(4)The results of the measurement showed that the level of college students' spirituality was below average.The spirituality levels of the dimensions from highest to lowest ranges were as follows:morality pursuit＞divinity worship＞open participation＞transcend experience. Significant differences were found in gender and religion background.No significant differences in grade,urban or not,major and singleton or not were found in general spirituality.No significant interactions were found in the whole scale among gender,grade and singleton or not,while significant interaction between gender and singleton or not was found in transcend experience.The results of regression analysis showed that religion background(no religion background)influences spirituality greatest. (5)The education revelations of this study were as follows:using SSCS in school psychological counseling could widen the service area of consultation effectively,helping and guiding students according to the development characters of college students' spirituality could improve the pertinence of psychological counseling of schools significantly,catching the scientific connotation of spirituality correctly could promote the construction of harmonious campus and harmonious society positively.