Search Institute

May 2008

Data Collection Begins in Eight Countries

Eugene C. Roehlkepartain

Data collection has begun in the international field test of a new survey of adolescent spiritual development from the Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence. At its core, the survey will examine the hypothesized core processes of spiritual development that have been identified through the established learning process , including existing research and ongoing engagement with the Center’s international advisors.

The survey will collect data from samples of young people, ages 12 to 25, in eight countries. The following research partners have joined the project to administer the surveys in their respective areas:

• Australia —Christian Research Association, Nunawading, Victoria (Philip Hughes)
• Cameroon —University of Yaounde the Human Development Resource Centre, Bamenda (Bame Nsamenang)
• Canada —Family Wise, Calgary (Kelly Dean Schwartz); Toronto Catholic District School Board, Toronto (Michael Fellin)
• India —Yellow Brick Road, Pune, India (Divyanshu Ganatra)
• Thailand —Mahidol University, Bangkok (Parichart Suwanbubbha); Church of Christ in Thailand, Muang Chiang Mai (Janram Chaisri); and Payap University, (Tussaneeya Wongchant) (in collaboration with Philip Hughes in Australia)
• Ukraine —TEMENOS: Center for Self-Realization, Cherkasy (Barbara Leger)
• United Kingdom —Religions and Education Research Unit, University of Warwick, Coventry (Leslie Francis)
• United States —New England Network for Child, Youth, & Family Services, Burlington, Vermont (Melanie Wilson); and Search Institute.

The field test will:

• Document among youth the components of spiritual development that are reported in different cultures and traditions globally, based on the center’s emerging framework for spiritual development;
• Examine the relationships among these components, within and across cultures;
• Investigate linkage of SD components with various health, psychological, educational, and civic indicators; and
• Validate this new measurement of spiritual development across cultures and traditions while also testing a Web-based methodology for cross-national studies.

The target is to collect survey data from up to 1,000 young people in each participating country by July 2008. Sampling and data collection methods are being customized in collaboration with the research partners to ensure their appropriateness to the particular culture. Though the samples will not be nationally representative (for logistical and financial reasons), they will be broad and diverse, based on the demographics of young people in each participating country. Results will be released in November.

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August 2007

Spiritual Development Survey Update

Peter C. Scales, Ph.D.

The Center for Spiritual Development team is well on the way to producing a new survey on adolescent spiritual development. Our hope is to have the survey ready for field testing in several countries in early 2008.

Through the use of the survey, we hope to be able to learn whether there is a core of spiritual development—even if experienced differently—that is a relatively common part of adolescent development globally, and how these elements of spiritual development are connected to adolescent well-being in different cultures.

Developing this survey poses interesting challenges, both in the survey content and in the methodology for gathering data from young people around the globe. One specific challenge is reflected in our desire to make sure the survey can validly capture the diversity of spiritual development across differing cultures and faith traditions. Another challenge is the need for the instrument—and the concept of spiritual development it operationalizes—to add something of value to what we already understand about human development from the scientific work in domains such as cognitive development, moral development, psychological development, and socioemotional development. That is, what does spiritual development add that isn’t already explained by cognitive development, or moral development, etc.?

Validly Capturing Spiritual Diversity
The first challenge encompasses both conceptual and methodological facets. For example, we have been trying to develop one unified definition of spiritual development that satisfies numerous criteria, such as being relevant for males and females, and across ages, cultures, and faith traditions. That definition—and thus, the survey that concretizes that emerging definition—has to resolve issues raised by our international advisors. These include:

• The relationship between religious development and spiritual development (we need to disentangle spiritual development and religious development without devaluing either);
• Whether there can really be a “universal” understanding of spiritual development (there might eventually be a shared understanding of spiritual development, but it is likely expressed in many diverse “spiritualities”);
• In what ways spiritual development really is something that “develops” (whether it is a linear and stage-like process, or one filled with regression and discontinuity even though a process of “organized change”); and
• How we frame the relative emphasis on individualism and collectivism/communalism (i.e., our survey has to balance tapping the Western emphasis on individual development with a more communal understanding more prevalent in other cultures).

In addition, the survey also has to measure the potential of spiritual development to be either positive or negative. Throughout history, discrimination, prejudice, and terrorism have often been energized by religious and spiritual values, just as those values have spurred some of the noblest endeavors of humankind.

So the survey has to satisfy these criteria and address these issues. It has to validly measure “spiritual development” among young people growing up Catholic in middle-class America, Muslim in Jordan, and Hindu in India. It also has to be relevant and validly measure spiritual development among young people who are agnostic, atheist, or simply not religious, regardless of the rest of their cultural context. And it has to “work” for other lower-frequency intersections of faith tradition and culture, such as youth in the U.S. who follow Buddhist teachings, or Christian youth in Egypt, or Muslim youth in the U.K.

If we are neither to inextricably entangle religion with spiritual development, nor artificially exclude it, then we must ask questions about religious practices, since those will be a critical element of spiritual development for many youth, and perhaps the majority of youth, around the world.

The Example of Prayer
Consider a seemingly simple question about frequency of prayer, such as “How often do you pray or meditate, other than at a religious service or before meals?” Some youth will respond that they don’t pray. Presumably, other youth would answer that they don’t pray outside of a religious service or mealtimes, but they might engage in other practices of a religious and/or spiritual nature, from reading sacred texts, to attending services, to singing religious or spiritual songs, to intentionally experiencing the beauty or power of nature.

As we develop our survey, we must think about our intentions and our potential interpretations of the data we will be gathering. For example, is someone who prays outside of services, but who doesn’t do as much of those other activities more spiritually developed than someone who prays infrequently or not at all, but who frequently and deeply engages in these other practices? That is, is praying or meditating—or any other practice or ritual—an essential, indispensable part of spiritual development that anyone who is to be judged as “spiritual” must have or satisfy? Or, in contrast, is spiritual development evidenced by individually unique combinations of numerous dimensions, so that a person with one profile might be “scored” as being just as spiritual as another person with a thoroughly different profile of values and beliefs, practices, spiritual experiences, and ways of expressing spirituality in relationships and actions?

And how does one use frequency of prayer as part of a spiritual development index if the meaning of differing frequencies is different across traditions? For example, a Muslim is expected to formally pray several times a day as a basic rule of observance. Thus, praying several times a day is the norm and not evidence of any particularly strong religious or spiritual commitment. But a Methodist youth who prays several times a day would be seen as demonstrating strong religious or spiritual commitment, because there are no such explicit expectation about frequency of prayer in that faith tradition. So, for which youth is the frequency of prayer a more meaningful construct?

Finally, there is the matter of what a young person prays for, and whether that should affect how their involvement in prayer is interpreted. It is likely there would be reasonable consensus across traditions that someone who prayed largely for his or her own material gains in this world would be considered more selfish than spiritual. But who is more spiritual, a young person who prays for the strength to cope gracefully with a disease or lovingly with a difficult family situation, or a young person who prays for world peace or the end of hunger? And what of a young person who does not pray “for” anything, per se, but meditates as a means of clearing his or her mind to be empty of all thoughts and desires and therefore most at one with the irreducible essence of the universe? In creating an index of spirituality, is that young person scored as being equally spiritual, more spiritual, or less spiritual than one who prays for world peace, or for personal strength for coping?

Other Dimensions of Spiritual Development
That is just an example of one variable—prayer—and how complicated it gets as a survey topic and a component of a spiritual development score or index. Every possible dimension of spiritual development presents these complex issues, of how to “cover” the dimension in a way that allows young people in varied contexts and traditions to express that dimension on the survey, and of how to then interpret or score responses in a way that validly communicates either the kind of spiritual development path (the process of spiritual development) or the current level of spiritual development (the status of spiritual development) a young person seems to be experiencing.

When we asked our international advisors about possible important dimensions of spiritual development, we found they had the most consensus on these:

• How persons address ultimate questions of existence, meaning and purpose.
• How persons develop the sense that life has meaning beyond the ordinary or mundane.
• How persons make sense of their lives and understand their reason for being.
• How persons understand their relationship to that which is transcendent or sacred.
• How persons grow in self-awareness through relationship (to community, to nature, to humanity, to the divine, to ancestors etc.).
• How persons embed the self in something larger than the self.
• How persons develop and live out an orientation to life in response to that which is for them the highest truth.
• How persons find and honor the sacred.
• How persons create the hope or conviction that their time on earth matters.
• How persons understand and make commitments to what they see as eternal and timeless (such as ultimate truth or reality).
• How persons forge a connection between the self and the universe (community, ancestors, nature, humanity, higher power etc.).

If these truly are essential to an understanding of spiritual development (and some advisors in some traditions disagreed with some of these being critical, and rated other possible dimensions as more important), then the survey needs to contain a sufficient number of items so that each of these dimensions can be reliably and validly measured across contexts, cultures, and traditions. It is an extreme challenge to develop one set of items that can do so, so it is possible that the research team will use a combination of a core of items that all youth will have, plus additional items or modules tailored to be phrased to be more appropriate for young people who respond one way or another to filter questions, or who are from particular cultures or faith traditions.

That could create different headaches, however, such as then determining whether such differing modularized surveys are actually equivalent, despite the different wording being used to measure the “same” spiritual development dimension. There is also the danger of assuming that questions meant to tap, for example, a more “Buddhist” perspective on spiritual experiences or practices are not relevant to a Presbyterian youth from Iowa, or an apparently nonreligious youth from China, when in fact those questions might be quite relevant to that youth’s experience.

Adding Value to Understanding of Human Development
There also is the question of what our definition of spiritual development will add to what is already known from investigations in the traditional domains of human development. Some of the dimensions our advisors rated as important seem to satisfy this criterion of producing a value-add. For example, the dimension “how persons find and honor the sacred” seems directly addressed by spiritual development in a way that identity development alone does not seem to cover.

The Example of Life Purpose
But now take another of the dimensions our advisors rated as quite important to be in a construct of spiritual development, that of “how persons make sense of their lives and understand their reason for being.” One could argue that research and items on both identity and ego development, as well as on social development, can provide an adequate understanding and measurement of this dimension. It does not necessarily take a conception of God, a Higher Power, or transcendent energy for someone to develop a sense of their talents and how they might best be used, or to dedicate themselves to several worthy causes that give them a sense of purpose over their lifetime. Is the contribution of spiritual development, then, simply to allow such Higher Power concepts to emerge as sources of energy and explanation for these aspects of development?

Or does spiritual development add something else to our understanding of how purpose in life develops? If it does, then we have to measure that extra “something” in the survey so that the survey isn’t simply a re-stating of questions and constructs that have already been used to measure identity and ego development, or social development. Or if we rely on such previous measures, we might have to combine or score them differently, in context with other measures pertinent to spiritual development specifically, in order to operationally “get at” the additive value that spiritual development may bring to understanding of human development.

Some of these questions will eventually be answerable empirically: When we finally have survey data, we can see how much different constructs contribute to measures of spiritual well-being, and thereby understand more clearly what additional value spiritual development constructs bring over and above, for example, a measure of positive identity or of social competence. But we must anticipate as much of this as possible from a theoretical perspective as we build the survey.

Survey Items So Far
Undeterred by these challenges, we have been moving forward and currently have an item pool of more than 300 candidate items—some gleaned from other surveys, some from Search Institute’s previous work, and some newly created. Expert review and pilot testing will winnow that total down to a manageable number. All of them fall mostly into 4 main areas of spiritual development:

• Self-knowledge (how we figure out what about the self has enduring value);
• Self-in-context (how we connect with the larger universe);
• Highest truth (how we weave 1 and 2 together to figure out our place in the universe); and
• Orientation to life (how 1, 2, and 3 are integrated into a way of being that is expressed in our commitments, obligations, and ideals).

Categorized another way, the items fall into several broad domains that we hope will provide a sufficiently broad and deep representation of spiritual development (the first five domains) that we can meaningfully predict young people’s spiritual well-being (the sixth domain below) across contexts, cultures, and traditions:

• Developmental foundations of spiritual development (e.g., empathy, openness to experience)
• Religious/spiritual beliefs and values
• Spiritual experiences
• Religious/spiritual practices and involvement
• Spirituality in relationships and actions
• Indicators of spiritual well-being (e.g., meaning, hope, contentment, gratitude)

Apart from the challenges of measuring all these things—and doing so in a survey that does not require days to complete—then we have to actually do the survey in countries around the world, we hope in 2008. But we are keeping our sense of humor about it all, which perhaps is also an indicator of spiritual well-being.