IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0117701.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Spirituality as a Scientific Construct: Testing Its Universality across Cultures and Languages

Author

Listed:
  • Douglas A MacDonald
  • Harris L Friedman
  • Jacek Brewczynski
  • Daniel Holland
  • Kiran Kumar K Salagame
  • K Krishna Mohan
  • Zuzana Ondriasova Gubrij
  • Hye Wook Cheong

Abstract

Using data obtained from 4004 participants across eight countries (Canada, India, Japan, Korea, Poland, Slovakia, Uganda, and the U.S.), the factorial reliability, validity and structural/measurement invariance of a 30-item version of Expressions of Spirituality Inventory (ESI-R) was evaluated. The ESI-R measures a five factor model of spirituality developed through the conjoint factor analysis of several extant measures of spiritual constructs. Exploratory factor analyses of pooled data provided evidence that the five ESI-R factors are reliable. Confirmatory analyses comparing four and five factor models revealed that the five dimensional model demonstrates superior goodness-of-fit with all cultural samples and suggest that the ESI-R may be viewed as structurally invariant. Measurement invariance, however, was not supported as manifested in significant differences in item and dimension scores and in significantly poorer fit when factor loadings were constrained to equality across all samples. Exploratory analyses with a second adjective measure of spirituality using American, Indian, and Ugandan samples identified three replicable factors which correlated with ESI-R dimensions in a manner supportive of convergent validity. The paper concludes with a discussion of the meaning of the findings and directions needed for future research.

Suggested Citation

  • Douglas A MacDonald & Harris L Friedman & Jacek Brewczynski & Daniel Holland & Kiran Kumar K Salagame & K Krishna Mohan & Zuzana Ondriasova Gubrij & Hye Wook Cheong, 2015. "Spirituality as a Scientific Construct: Testing Its Universality across Cultures and Languages," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(3), pages 1-38, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0117701
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0117701
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0117701
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0117701&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0117701?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jean-Louis Pernin, 2022. "Intention to support the existence of paranormal phenomena: exploratory comparisons between a psychosociological versus marketing approach [Intention de soutenir l’existence de phénomènes paranorma," Working Papers hal-03544450, HAL.
    2. Mader, Philip, 2024. "Orchestrating self-empowerment in tribal India: Debt bondage, land rights, and the strategic uses of spirituality," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 174(C).
    3. Kurt, Yusuf & Sinkovics, Noemi & Sinkovics, Rudolf R. & Yamin, Mo, 2020. "The role of spirituality in Islamic business networks: The case of internationalizing Turkish SMEs," Journal of World Business, Elsevier, vol. 55(1).
    4. Alina Deluga & Beata Dobrowolska & Krzysztof Jurek & Barbara Ślusarska & Grzegorz Nowicki & Alvisa Palese, 2020. "Nurses’ spiritual attitudes and involvement—Validation of the Polish version of the Spiritual Attitude and Involvement List," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(9), pages 1-16, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0117701. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.