DOI: 10.5176/2251-1865_CBP14.46
Authors: Tungshan Chou
Abstract:
This study examined the roles of religiosity and spirituality in older people’s quality of life in the Taiwanese context. The US-based popular instrument Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality (BMMRS) and the clinical instrument SF36 were co-administered to a local sample of 293 older people by 12 trained assistants in one-on-one interview settings. The factor analysis results of BMMRS revealed six noteworthy facets for measuring religiosity/spirituality: positive spiritual engagement, extrinsic religiosity, intrinsic religiosity, sense of guilt, self-assessed spirituality, and secular spirituality. When multiple regression was applied to relate these six facets of religiosity/spirituality simultaneously to each of the eight dimensions of quality of life (physical functioning, role physical, role emotional, social functioning, bodily pain, mental health, vitality, and general health perception), sense of guilt showed negative impact on the elderly people’s quality of life in contrast to the strong positive effects associated with self-assessed spirituality and secular spirituality. When cluster analysis was applied to classify individuals into distinctly different groups based on six religiosity/spirituality facets, four types were obtained: religiously and spiritually perfunctory, guilt driven, religious quest, and spiritually conscious/religiously non-practicing, of which the religiously and spiritually perfunctory type was the most dominant type; the religious quest type showed most desirable quality of life profile, whereas the guilt-driven type showed the worst. The results suggest that the constructs of religiosity and spirituality indeed play manifest roles in Taiwanese older people’s quality of life, albeit they are difficult to differentiate from each other and the dimensionality and efficacy of religiosity/spirituality as measured by BMMRS is somewhat different than what has been reported in western research literature
Keywords: Religiosity; Spirituality; BMMRS; SF36; Quality of life
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