Domains of spiritual well-being and development and validation of the Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire

Abstract

Fisher (1998) proposed a spiritual well-being model, comprising the domains of personal, communal, environmental and transcendental well-being, and a single global spiritual well-being dimension. This paper reports on four studies aimed at testing Fisher’s theoretical model, and establishing the validity and reliability of a new self-rating questionnaire (Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire; SWBQ), developed to reflect this model. All four studies supported Fisher’s model. The SWBQ showed good reliability (Cronbach’s alpha, composite reliability and variance extracted), and validity (construct, concurrent, discriminant, predictive and factorial independence from personality). The SWBQ has the advantage over other existing spiritual well-being measures in that it is based on a broader and more empirically based conceptualization of spiritual well-being, and has well established psychometric properties.