The International NERSH Data Pool of Health Professionals’ Attitudes Toward Religiosity and Spirituality in 12 Countries

Abstract

The amount of research concerned with the values of health professionals (HPs) is steadily growing. Around the world HPs face similar challenges when patients express their existential and spiritual views. How HPs engage these views, and the degree of embedment into consultations, differ across cultures. Today, more than ever before, researchers in this field need to share experiences and build new knowledge upon local findings. To meet this demand, we founded the international collaboration “Network for Research on Spirituality and Health” (https://NERSH.org). One of the central projects of our network has been to build a large international data pool of health professionals’ attitudes toward religiosity and spirituality. Today the data pool hosts answers from more than 6,000 health professionals from 17 separate surveys derived from 12 countries. Data were gathered by either the questionnaire “Religion and Spirituality in Medicine, Perspectives of Physicians” (RSMPP) or its successor ‘NERSH Questionnaire’. In this article we describe the methodology behind the construction of the data pool. We also present an overview of five available scales related to HP religiosity and spirituality, including a description of scale reliability and dimensionality.