Measuring Spiritual Wellbeing: A New Scale

The article, “Measuring Spiritual Wellbeing—Seeking a Valid, Reliable, and Usable Measure,” authored by Nigel Pegram and Rebecca Loundar, and published in Religions in 2025, presents the development and initial psychometric assessment of a new Spiritual Wellbeing Scale (SWS). This research was born out of an industry-based partnership between Mission Australia, an Australian charity with a Christian ethos, and Alphacrucis University College.

Background and Rationale for a New Measure:

The core impetus for this study was the need to effectively measure spiritual health and wellbeing within Mission Australia’s chaplaincy work, particularly among individuals and communities experiencing entrenched social disadvantage. Chaplains operate at both community and individual levels, and the ability to measure the impact of their interventions is crucial. As chaplains deal with “topics of spiritual importance,” a dedicated measure of spiritual wellbeing was identified as essential.

Before developing the SWS, the researchers conducted a review of existing spiritual wellbeing measures. These measures were found to be largely unsuitable for the specific usage scenario due to several critical limitations:

• Length and Practicality: Many instruments, such as the Spiritual Wellbeing Scale (20 items), the Spiritual Assessment Inventory (49 items), and the Spiritual Involvement and Beliefs Scale (26 items), were too lengthy for practical use in a chaplaincy context, especially with clients who might have lower levels of literacy.
• Conceptualization of Spirituality and Multi-Faith Applicability: A major concern was that many existing tools were “captive to a particular worldview’s understanding of spirituality or religion”.
  • For example, the INSPIRIT (7 items) and the RCSS (8 items) were rejected due to their “heavily theocentric view of spirituality,” which made them inappropriate for multi-cultural, multi-faith environments. Similarly, the STI (8 items) focused on transcendent experiences within a theocentric framework.
  • The Spirituality Index of Wellbeing (12 items), while shorter, did not represent a broad concept of spirituality, with many questions focusing on problem-solving rather than a full conceptualization of spirituality.
• PWI’s Spiritual Wellbeing Question: Even the Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI), which Mission Australia was already using, had an optional question about “satisfaction with spiritual or religious beliefs”. This was rejected because the PWI manual itself did not recommend its use due to it being a “double question” (spiritual or religious) and potential misunderstandings of the terms. Moreover, the research team found it not nuanced enough to cover the breadth of spiritual expression across diverse communities and considered it biased toward a Western, individualistic conceptualization. Feedback from Mission Australia’s leadership also criticized its lack of cultural awareness.

Development of the Spiritual Wellbeing Scale (SWS):

The SWS was developed by extending Fisher’s construct of four domains of spiritual wellbeing. Fisher’s original model interrogated relationships in four domains: the Divine, others, the environment, and the self. While Fisher’s model offered brevity and a solid theoretical foundation that was not overtly culturally specific, the researchers consulted experts in Humanities, Social Science, Ministry, and Theology to refine it.

This consultation led to the addition of two crucial domains, resulting in a six-item scale:

1. Meaning or purpose in life: Identified as a commonly used measure of spiritual wellbeing.
2. Relationship with the wider community: Included because “relationships with others” might be understood differently from relationships within a broader community context. Initial analyses later confirmed these additions interrogated distinct concepts from Fisher’s original four.

A crucial innovation of the SWS is its two-part format, which assesses both the relative importance (I) and the current state (S) of each of the six spiritual domains for the individual. This approach deviates from modern wellbeing scales that assume universal importance for all domains. The authors contended that due to the complexity and diversity of spirituality, this assumption is invalid for spiritual wellbeing. For instance, a person from a monotheistic faith might prioritize their relationship with the Divine over the environment, while someone with a pantheistic faith or an Indigenous Australian might place much greater importance on their relationship with the environment, which is deeply connected to their spirituality. The SWS uses a unipolar, ten-point scale (0-10) for consistency and familiarity, mirroring the PWI’s format already used by clients. This results in 12 questions in total (six importance, six state).

Methodology:

The study involved an online survey completed by 279 participants. The sample comprised staff from Mission Australia and staff and students from Alphacrucis University College. Demographics included participants ranging from their twenties to over sixty, with a gender split of 75% female and 25% male. Ethnicity was varied, though Oceanians (43%) and North-West Europeans (36%) dominated, reflecting the Australian population.

In addition to the SWS, participants also completed:

• The Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI) to assess subjective general wellbeing.
• The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), a 20-item measure of affective states (positive and negative emotions).
• Adapted versions of the PWI’s spiritual wellbeing questions (focusing on spiritual beliefs, religious beliefs, and religious practices).

These additional instruments were used to investigate the SWS’s convergent and discriminant validity. Ethical approval was obtained from Alphacrucis University College Human Research Ethics Committee.

Key Results and Discussion:

• Validation of the Two-Part Structure: The data confirmed the necessity of the two-part importance and state structure. Notably, for the domain “relationship with God/the Divine” (domain 2), 17% of respondents rated its importance as zero, and 26% rated it as very low (0-3). This contrasted sharply with other domains where few rated importance as low, underscoring that the importance of spiritual domains is not universally implicit and varies significantly across diverse spiritual beliefs.
• Calculating the Overall SWS Score: To account for domains rated as unimportant, the researchers developed a more nuanced calculation method. Instead of a simple multiplication (State × Importance), they convert importance scores into “proportional importance”. This “weighted state score” for each domain is calculated by multiplying the reported state by its proportional importance. The overall SWS score is the sum of these weighted state scores, reported as a percentage, which provides a much clearer and easier-to-interpret picture of an individual’s spiritual wellbeing (e.g., 45.71% vs. 96/600 by simple multiplication).
• Descriptive Statistics:
  • Most questions demonstrated a full range of responses (0-10).
  • The means for both importance and state scores generally clustered around 7 (on a 0-10 scale), similar to other wellbeing measures.
  • The standard deviation for the importance of “relationship with God/the Divine” (3.71) was significantly larger than other domains. This supports the expectation that in a multi-faith setting, some domains (like a theocentric one) would be relevant to some participants but not others.
  • The absence of lowest importance ratings for “relationships with other people” (no scores below 3) highlights the universal importance of relationships across the population.
  • No respondents reported being “not at all satisfied” (score of 0) in “relationship with the wider community” or “relationship with the environment,” suggesting all respondents derive some satisfaction from these areas.
• Validation of Additional Domains: Paired t-test analyses confirmed that the added domains – “relationship with the wider community” and “meaning or purpose in life” – interrogated concepts distinct from Fisher’s original four, both in terms of importance and state ratings.
• Psychometric Properties (Reliability and Validity):
  • Internal Reliability: The Cronbach’s alpha values were excellent for short scales. The importance sub-scale had an alpha of 0.81, and the state sub-scale had an alpha of 0.875. While removing “relationship with God/the Divine” (domain 2) would slightly increase alpha, the authors argue strongly for its retention due to the theoretical importance of including theocentric belief as an aspect of spirituality, especially in a multi-faith context.
  • Factor Analysis: For both the importance and state scales, the analysis revealed a one-factor structure, meaning all six domains contribute to a single, overarching concept of spiritual wellbeing. This supports the cohesion of the scale.
• Correlation with Other Measures (Convergent and Discriminant Validity):
  • PWI Spirituality Questions: The SWS state scores showed moderate correlations with the PWI’s adapted spirituality questions. However, the lower-than-expected correlations prompted further investigation. Factor analysis of the SWS and PWI spirituality questions revealed a two-factor structure:
    • Factor One: Included all SWS questions (or most SWS questions except domain 2 for weighted scores), representing a broader, less formal, non-theocentric spirituality.
    • Factor Two: Loaded onto the three PWI questions and SWS domain 2 (“relationship with God/the Divine”), representing formal, theocentric spirituality, perhaps better termed “religion”. This distinction explains the lower correlations, as they measure different forms of spirituality. Despite the PWI questions loading strongly onto Factor Two, the authors decided not to include them due to concerns about cultural insensitivity (especially for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures), their perceived narrower conceptualization of spirituality, and the preference for a shorter, more practical tool for clinical/pastoral settings.
  • Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS): As hypothesized, the SWS showed significant moderate positive correlation with positive affect (r = 0.489) and significant negative correlation with negative affect (r = -0.427). This supports the SWS measuring an aspect associated with emotional wellbeing.
  • Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI) General Questions: The SWS displayed moderate to strong correlations with the PWI’s general life domains and composite scores (e.g., r = 0.757 with composite PWI, r = 0.657 with “Life as a whole”). The strong correlation with “Personal relationships” (r = 0.698) was unsurprising given its conceptual closeness to SWS domains related to human connection. The authors contend that these strong correlations reflect how spiritual wellbeing, encompassing concepts like meaning, purpose, and wider relationships, conceptually relates strongly to an overall evaluation of life wellbeing.
• Demographic Characteristics:
  • Age: There was a significant relationship between age and overall spiritual wellbeing, with a general pattern of increasing spiritual wellbeing with age. Specifically, the importance of “relationship with the environment” increased with age, and “relationship with yourself” showed a significant difference between those in their 30s and 60s (with older groups having higher wellbeing).
  • Gender: No significant differences were found between male and female respondents, though some importance questions approached significance, warranting future re-evaluation with more data.
  • Ethnicity: The “Other” ethnic group displayed significantly higher overall spiritual wellbeing scores (µ = 8.0) compared to North-West Europeans (µ = 7.3). Similar findings were observed for “meaning or purpose in life” (domain 1 state), where the “Other” group had significantly higher scores than NW Europeans and Oceanians. The authors acknowledge the small numbers in some ethnic groups limit the validity of this analysis but suggest ethnicity is a factor worth pursuing in larger studies. They also noted a concern about potential confusion between ethnicity and nationality in the survey design, with a higher-than-expected number of respondents identifying as Indigenous Australians.

Field Implementation Feedback and Further Research:

Anecdotal feedback from the chaplaincy team using the scale in the field suggested that presenting the importance and state questions together for each domain (e.g., “importance for domain 1,” then “state for domain 1,” then move to domain 2) might prevent respondents from simply repeating importance scores for state scores, which occurred when questions were presented in two separate blocks (all importance questions, then all state questions). The authors recommend investigating this amended presentation method.

Several areas for further research are identified:

• Confirmatory studies with other spiritual wellbeing measures are needed to confirm the SWS measures spiritual wellbeing and compare the constructs used, specifically focusing on critiques of existing measures (theocentric/ritualistic bias, need for weighting).
• Creating a larger pool of responses for analysis will help clarify the role of ethnicity, allow for the creation of normalized data for potential diagnostic use, and provide information for further psychometric analysis.
• Including a question on nationality before ethnicity might mitigate confusion between the two concepts in future surveys.
• Statistically evaluating the impact of question presentation format (two blocks vs. paired importance/state questions).

In conclusion, the article introduces a valid, reliable, and usable Spiritual Wellbeing Scale (SWS) that significantly contributes to measuring spiritual health in diverse, multi-faith contexts, particularly among socially disadvantaged populations. Its unique two-part importance and state structure, and broader conceptualization of spirituality, address key limitations of previous instruments.

Reference: Pegram, N., & Loundar, R. (2025). Measuring Spiritual Wellbeing—Seeking a Valid, Reliable, and Usable Measure. Religions, 16, 685. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16060685