Structure of spirituality among high-school students differs depending on relationship with someone or something Greater (RSG)

Abstract

AbstractPurpose: To investigate the structure of spirituality among teenagers, who live in a secular country, employing a QoL assessment, the EORTC QLQ-SWB32. Methods: Japanese high-school students, 15 to 17 years of age, answered EORTC QLQ-SWB32, which had 5 scales: Relationships with Others, Relationship with Self (RS), Existential, Relationship with Someone or Something Greater (RSG), and Change. It had “skip” items 22 and 23 (score range:0–200), which distinguished non-believers (score:0), light believers (score:33–66), and deep believers (score:100–200). Cronbach’s alpha and principal component analysis (PCA) were investigated. Correlations between item-32 (global spiritual well-being (SWB)) scores and 5 scale-scores were estimated. Global SWB scores were compared among groups via one-way ANOVA. Results: Among 283 male students, there were 142 non-believers (50%), 98 light believers (35%), and 43 deep believers (15%). Cronbach’s alpha values of the five scales were above 0.7 for deep believers. However, RSG did not show internal consistency for non-believers and light believers. PCA showed that the RSG items constructed a RSG scale for deep believers but did not make any scale for non-believers and light believers. The correlation coefficients between global SWB and RSG increased in order of non-believers (r = 0.295), light believers (r = 0.399), and deep believers (r = 0.559). RS correlated with global SWB in non-believers and light believers (r<- 0.4). Among groups, light believers had significantly better global SWB than non-believers and deep believers (p = 0.0312). Conclusion: The structure of spirituality among high-school students differs depending on RSG. And RS might be critical for students without sense of RSG. Trial registration number: This observation study was retrospectively registered on 2nd November 2021 (UMIN 000045962).