Importance of Spirituality - Subject Baseline
This measure appears in the following time-points: Baseline.
Related Construct
Description of Measure
The Importance of Spirituality measure, developed by Maton (1989), is a highly reliable assessment of spirituality (Maton, Teti, Corns, Vieira-Baker, Lavine, Gouze, and Keating, 1996). The scale contains three items that ask participants to indicate how much their actions are influenced by belief in a god. Participants respond on a 5- point Likert scale ranging from "Not at all true" to "Completely true," with higher scores indicating a greater degree of spirituality. These three items are summed into a single scale score. Two additional items are included to evaluate the importance of one's religion (e.g., "How important has religion been in your life?"), as well as the participant's average yearly service attendance (e.g., "During the past year, how often did you attend church, synagogue, or other religious service?"). These are left as individual items.
The Importance of Spirituality measure was found to have good internal consistency at the baseline time-point (alpha = .88). In addition, a one-factor CFA model was fit to the data and produced an acceptable model: NFI.99; NNFI: .97; CFI: 99; RMSEA: .1
One score is computed:
- Importance of spirituality [s0relign], the mean of three items; two items must contain data in order to receive a computed mean.
The following individual items are also available for this measure.
- Past year how often attend church [S0Rlg1]
- How important has religion been in your life [S0Rlg2]
- I experience Gods love and caring on a regular basis [S0Rlg3]
- I experience a close personal relationship to God [S0Rlg4]
- Religion helps me to deal with my problems [S0Rlg5]
References
- Maton, K.I. (1989). The stress-buffering role of spiritual support: Cross-sectional and prospective investigations. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 28(3), 310-323
- Maton, K.I., Teti, D., Corns, K., Vieira-Baker, K., Lavine, J., Gouze, K.R., and Keating, D. (1996). Cultural specificity of social support sources, correlates and contexts: Three studies of African-American and Caucasian youth. American Journal of Community Psychology, 24, 551-587.