"The Study on Stress, Spirituality, and Health (SSSH): Psychometric Evaluation and Initial Validation of the SSSH Baseline Spirituality Survey".

Lynn Underwood,Tianyi Huang,Blake Victor Kent,Julie R. Palmer,M. Austin Argentieri,Erica T. Warner,Shelley A. Cole,Harold G. Koenig,Alka M. Kanaya,Wade C. Rowatt,Kenneth Pargament,Mark A. Blais,Alexandra E. Shields,Martha L. Daviglus,Ying Zhang

doi:10.3390/rel12030150

Abstract

This paper describes the development and initial psychometric testing of the baseline Spirituality Survey (SS-1) from the Study on Stress, Spirituality, and Health (SSSH) which contained a mixture of items selected from validated existing scales and new items generated to measure important constructs not captured by existing instruments. The purpose was to establish the validity of new and existing measures in our racially/ethnically diverse sample. Psychometric properties of the SS-1 were evaluated using standard psychometric analyses in 4,634 SSSH participants. Predictive validity of SS-1 scales was assessed in relation to the physical and mental health component scores from the Short-Form 12 Health Survey (SF-12). Scales exhibited adequate to strong psychometric properties and demonstrated construct and predictive validity. Overall, the correlational findings provide solid evidence that the SS-1 scales are associated with a wide range of relevant R/S attitudes, mental health, and to a lesser degree physical health.

Highlights

Published literature on the influence of religion and spirituality (R/S) on human health has grown substantially in recent years (Demir 2019; Koenig 2012), yet R/S measures are still not prioritized in large prospective studies investigating the etiology of disease (Shields and Balboni 2020)
This paper describes the initial psychometric evaluation of the baseline Spirituality Survey (SS-1) assessed among 4563 adult respondents from five prospective cohorts participating in the Study on Stress, Spirituality, and Health (SSSH)
Responses demonstrated that religion and spirituality (R/S) are significant components of most participants’ lives

Summary

Introduction

Published literature on the influence of religion and spirituality (R/S) on human health has grown substantially in recent years (Demir 2019; Koenig 2012), yet R/S measures are still not prioritized in large prospective studies investigating the etiology of disease (Shields and Balboni 2020). Exceptions occur among those cohorts with an explicit focus on. An analysis of all surveys fielded by 20 large U.S.-based prospective cohort reveals, for example, that only 7 out of 20 cohorts had ever collected at least three different R/S measures in the history of their cohort (CGVH 2019) This oversight is important since the potential influence of R/S on health likely differs across racial/ethnic communities.

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