Introducing the Junior Spiritual Health Scale (JSHS): assessing the impact of religious affect on spiritual health among 8- to 11-year-old students

Abstract

This study describes the developing and testing of a measure of spiritual health accessible to 8- to 11-year-old students that is consistent with the four-domain model as operationalised by Fisher’s family of measures, but avoids explicit religious or theistic content. Data generated by 4,803 students in Wales confirm the rotated four-factor structure of the new 12-item measure and also the coherence of employing the total scale score as a unidimensional measure of global spiritual health (α = .90). After taking personal factors and psychological factors into account, regression analysis demonstrated that religious affect contributed additional power to predicting higher spiritual health scores on this new measure that was not itself contaminated by explicit religious or theistic content. This instrument is commended as providing a sound foundation for assessing the spiritual health of primary school students within a variety of religious and non-religious schools.