The Relationship between Spiritual Intelligence and a Student’s Adaptation to College Life:Implications for Social Work Practice

Abstract

Spiritual intelligence is a greatly significant and influential domain in one’s personality. It is basically connected withdevelopmental phases, and that is what, indeed, makes it no less important than other intelligence categories. This concept (Spiritual Intelligence) is claimed to be one of the most popular in both humanscience in general, and social work specifically. Based on this, it is evident that spiritual intelligence has an undeniable effect on a client’s social life, and all of its settings, which really necessitates researching it precisely. An additional reason for tackling this concept is scarcity of research emphasizing the role spiritual intelligence can play in education and practice of social work in terms of the Arab environment.Proportionally, the purpose of the study reported in this article was to identify levels of both spiritual intelligence and adaptation to college life for students at campus, and explore the nature of therelationship between both levels. The study population comprised of (N = 302) third-grade students at the School of Social Work, Helwan University, for the academic year 2016-2017. The criteria of validity and the reliability of study tools were met using another subpopulation of (N= 302) participants, which had the same traits as themain study, with the aim of verifying tools’ consistency.The study assumes there is a significant correlation between degrees of spiritual intelligence and adaptation to college life for social work students. As a conclusion, it poses a list of recommendations that can foster professional practice of socialworkers functioning with university students concerning the impact of spiritual intelligence on their personalities and problems.