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The current study describes the development of a theoretically-based assessment tool including five domains of psychospiritual functioning: Integrated Faith Ownership, Spiritual Community, Spiritual Struggles, Secure Attachment to God, and Gut-level Emotional Response to God. Using self-report and narrativebased methods of analysis, this tool provides access to both explicit and implicit spiritual functioning that is more thorough than measures relying exclusively on self-report and more efficient than extant narrativebased measures. The article describes the process of developing and refining questions and coding criteria. Psychometric tests for inter-rater reliability, goodness of fit, internal consistency, and external validity are presented. Limitations and applications of the instrument are discussed.
Psychologists have been interested in the human experience of religion and spirituality (RS) for over a century. William James (1902) and Sigmund Freud (1907) were among the first to share their theoretical views about the psychological aspects of religion, and a growing number of psychologists continue to explore the subject. The quest for empirical knowledge of RS dates to the 1950s with Allport & Ross' (1967) Religious Orientation Measure, after which hundreds of self-report measures were developed to assess some aspect of religious experience, behavior, and belief (Hill & Hood, 1999; Hill & Smith, 2013).
Limitations of Self-Report Measures
Despite the strengths of self-report measures, there is increasing concern about their limitations (Edwards & Hall, 2003; Shedler, Mayman, & Manis, 1993, 2003; Slater, Hall, & Edwards, 2001). For example, participants vary in their ability and desire to understand questions, perform introspection, and answer honestly. Even if a participant is willing and able to answer accurately, responses may vary between individuals based on, for example, how much evidence is needed for an "affirmative" response, whether the individual tends to answer towards the extremes of a Likert scale or hover around the center, or how much "space" an individual envisions between the points of a scale. Furthermore, rich autobiographical data is missed when quantitative answers to yes/no or Likert scale questions are the only response options. There are many advantages to self-report scales; however, these issues show that alternative approaches are needed.
The Framework for a New Measure
A number of recent theoretical advances in spiritual assessment have set a platform from which a new measure can be created. One such...