Spirituality

 The Daily Spiritual Experience Scale (DSES) was designed originally do health studies and has since branched out in use by many fields and levels of research.  Lynn G. Underwood (2006) developed the 16 point scale in order to provide an accurate self-report measure of daily experiences of religiosity and spirituality.  The scale has been translated into over five different languages and utilized in studies around the world.  The major difference in this scale compared with others is that it accounts for spirituality without necessarily being religious.  This scale was determined to be most effective for the purposes of this study because it accurately measures the variable needed, which is spirituality.  

Gender Differences 

 There is ample research that finds correlations between females and higher depression rates.  Additionally, there is growing interest in the area of gender and spiritually.  In the study, “Relational Spirituality and Depression in Adolescent Girls” distinguishes between the terms spirituality (closeness to higher power) and religiosity (practicing religion) in order to focus on relational spirituality.  Desroisers and Miller (2007) operationally define relational spirituality as “the self in relationship with God or the Universe” and they found that females report higher connectedness than do males.  The primary focus of their study was to analyze the relationship between young girls, depression, and relational spirituality.  The finding that relational spirituality was more prevalent in girls than boys relates to the current study’s hypothesis that males will have lower religiosity/spirituality scores than females.  Causal factors are not explored in this study but the relationship alone contributes to the literature on the subject and amplifies previous studies with similar conclusions.

Divorce

 Research suggests that there is a relationship between divorce and spirituality.  In the article “Divorce and the Divine: The Role of Spirituality in Adjustment to Divorce,” three components of divorce are examined in relation to spirituality.  The first goal of the study assessed how spiritual of a loss the community viewed divorce and how people coped, the second goal looked at the psychological adjustment of using spiritual coping mechanisms, and the third goal linked how people coped with depression using a mediation model (Krumrei, Mahoney, & Pargament, 2009).  The results of their study indicated that the majority of their participants did consider their divorce a sacred loss, did use spiritual methods in order to cope, and did have difficulty coping with their divorce within their spirituality.  These findings are important to consider for the current study because in having already established that people do consider marriage a sacred union, those that do not have any disruption in their spirituality through divorce are likely to be more spiritual than those that did experience divorce.

Comment if you have a story about divorce and how you coped.

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