Part I The of Religion and Spirituality: Implications for Education and Wellbeing – An Introduction

Leslie J. Francis

According to its etymology, the discipline of psychology is concerned with the study of the mind, with the study of the soul, with the study of the human .This broad definition, however, is far from unproblematic. What is meant by the human mind, the human soul, the human psyche? And what tools are available to study such phenomena anyway? The broad history of the development of psychology as an academic discipline in its own right is the story of how these two problems have been addressed: the problem of substance (what is being studied) and the problem of method (how is the study being conducted). Right from the early days of the developing discipline of psychology, religion and spirituality have been seen as a matter of central concern (see, for example, , 1902). Although this central concern with religion and spirituality seemed to disappear from the radar of psychology for a number of years, the topic is now firmly back on the agenda as evidenced by the foundation of the International Journal for the in 1980, the revitalisation of the Archive for the Psychology of Religion in the 1990s and the development of a new journal from the American Psychological Association in 2009 dedicated to the psychology of religion and spirituality. The aim of this chapter is to provide a general introduction to and overview of the per- spective on the psychology of religion and spirituality taken by and shaped within this handbook concerned with education, care and wellbeing. This perspective has been informed by three considerations. The first consideration concerns the range of people on whom the perspective is focused. Different branches of psychology are properly concerned with dif- ferent populations: the mentally ill (say, ), the criminal and the deviant (say, forensic psychology) or the general population of people who have been diagnosed as neither “mad” nor “bad” (say, “normal” psychology). This part of the handbook is concerned with the normal population broadly conceived. The second consideration concerns the subject matter (the data) under consid- eration. Different branches of psychology are properly concerned with different approaches to their subject. Some approaches are concerned with examining the functioning of the human brain (say, neuroscience) and this concern has proved to be fruitful within the broad field of the psychology of religion and spirituality. Other approaches are concerned with ways of accessing human experience and

7 8 L.J. Francis interpreting the and significance of human responses. This part of the handbook is concerned with the latter of these two approaches. The third consideration concerns the ways in which human experiences and human responses can be accessed and studied (the methodology). Broadly within the social sciences the main methodological division occurs between qualitative and quantitative approaches. The qualitative approach (say, using interviews) has the strength of providing rich and deep description, often allowing the voices of individuals to be heard with clarity. The quantitative approach (say, using question- naire surveys) has the strength of providing access to a large number of people and of allowing more secure generalisations to be made. This part of the handbook is concerned primarily with the quantitative approach, although it is fully recognised that the two approaches are complementary and properly inform and enrich one another. Good use is made of the qualitative approach as and when appropriate. Within the quantitative tradition there are certain key assumptions that shape what is taken seriously and how the methodology proceeds. The first key assump- tion concerns the notion of measurement. It is assumed that central psychological constructs can be accessed and calibrated in ways that mimic the measurement of physical constructs. Such a notion is far from being unproblematic. It may be relatively straightforward to measure the length of an individual’s arm or the cir- cumference of an individual’s head, but it is much more problematic to measure , extraversion or spirituality. In a sense, all these psychological notions (unlike the physical notions of arms and heads) are abstractions. They are ways of talking about elusive aspects of the human psyche rather than being objective “things” in their own right. In order to measure such abstractions, it is necessary to be very clear about the way in which terms are to be used (the issue of definition) and about the way in which accepted definitions are to be translated into measures (the issue of operationalisation). Many of the notions with which the quantitative approach to psychology deals are highly contested within other spheres of debate (say other disciplines). There is, for example, no one accepted definition of constructs like intelligence, extraversion, religion or spirituality. It is for this reason that definitions adopted by as a basis for developing measuring instruments themselves remain contested. There are, for example, a number of generally accepted measures of the notion of extraver- sion, but it cannot be assumed that these instruments all measure the same “thing”. The view generally taken within this part of the handbook is that it is sensible and proper to work with the precise definitions offered by the instruments used and to take care not to generalise research findings beyond these definitions to the wider area of concern. For example, if an instrument sets out to access and operationalise one definition of spirituality, it is a fundamental mistake to assume that the findings can be generalised to embrace a wide diverse range of definitions. The operationalisation of carefully argued definitions remains problematic in its own right. Those who develop and deploy psychological measures need to demon- strate that these measures are in fact measuring what they claim to be measuring. Technically this problem involves issues of reliability and validity. A reliable instru- ment is one that can be trusted to produce consistent findings. If I measure the I The Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 9 circumference of an individual’s head today and measure it again tomorrow, I would expect consistent findings. If I measure an individual’s level of intelligence today and measure it again tomorrow, I would expect similar if not identical findings. A test that is not reliable cannot be valid. A valid instrument is one that can be trusted to measure the construct under review. If I measure an individual’s right arm, I cannot validly claim to have measured the outstretched span of both arms. I could extrapolate from my findings and make an informed prediction, but I still need to be honest about what has been measured and about what has not been measured. There is a variety of ways in which psychologists deal with this issue. The second key assumption within the quantitative tradition is that measure- ment enables precise hypotheses to be tested and the significance of associations between variables to be established by statistical procedures. The main findings from research and the main conclusions presented in this part of the handbook have been generally tested and established by these kinds of statistical procedures. The implications of findings established in this way can be illuminated and illustrated by data generated within the qualitative tradition. Against the background of this broad theoretical perspective, the intention of the rest of this chapter is to introduce and to contextualise the 13 focused contributions. In Chapter 1, Ralph W. Hood Jr. discusses the ways of studying the psychology of religion and spirituality. Rather than applaud and promote a single method, Hood explores the range of methods available to psychologists who study religion and spirituality. He alerts us to the proper limitations associated with different methods, but is clear in his rejection of the position argued by some recent commentators claiming the primacy of experimental approaches. Hood’s chapter is especially important because it helps to establish the value and the importance of the wider range of methods on which the authors of subsequent chapters draw. In Chapter 2, Peter C. Hill and Lauren E. Maltby go to the heart of the individual differences approach that shapes this part of the handbook in order to discuss issues concerned with measuring religiousness and spirituality. After discussing general issues related to measurement, they provide a very useful introduction to and a cri- tique of a range of existing measures in the field. This review builds on the earlier influential and authoritative volume that Peter C. Hill co-edited with Ralph W. Hood Jr. under the title, Measures of Religiosity (Hill & Hood, 1999). In Chapter 3, Chris J. Boyatzis focuses attention on what is known from research about religion and spiritual development during childhood and adolescence. He tackles key questions including the following. What does spirituality look like in a child? Does religion make a genuine difference in the lives of children and youth? How do we measure spiritual and religious development in children and adolescents? How can we characterise religious and spiritual development in its pro- cesses, sequences and stages? After a long period during which empirical research in the field was conspicuous by its neglect, Boyatzis identifies the signs of new developments and growth in this field. In Chapter 4, John W. Fisher introduces the notion of spiritual health and rehearses his well-established model of characterising good spiritual health as involving four domains of life. For Fisher the individual who experiences good 10 L.J. Francis spiritual health has developed good relationships with the self, good relationships with other people, good relationships with the environment and good relationships with the transcendent, however this is conceived. This model of spiritual health is attractive because it is well defined, coherent and open to operationalisation. Fisher proceeds to describe the instruments that he has developed to assess spiri- tual health across the four domains: The Spiritual Health in Four Domains Index, Spiritual Health and Life-Orientation Measure, Feeling Good Living Life and Qual- ity of Influences Survey. He illustrates the application of these instruments among school pupils, university students and other in Australia and the United Kingdom. In Chapter 5, Ralph L. Piedmont examines the research evidence concerning the contribution of religion and spirituality to subjective wellbeing and satisfaction with life. Building on one of his own major contributions to the research literature, Piedmont examines the numinous constructs of religiosity and spirituality relative to one another and to the five-factor model of personality. The strength of this approach is that it highlights the ways in which spirituality and religion have an unmediated impact on levels of life satisfaction. Piedmont develops two main conclusions from this finding. First, spirituality and religiosity represent universal human motives that are additional to the areas generally covered by models of human personality. In other words, models of human functioning need to be expanded to embrace spiri- tuality and religiosity if they are to be comprehensive. Second, because spirituality and religiosity are capable of impacting subjective wellbeing and satisfaction with life, they suggest the potential for identifying a new class of intervention techniques that can promote durable psychological change. In Chapter 6, Kate M. Loewenthal examines the interactions between culture, religion and spirituality in relation to psychiatric illness. Given that most of the extant research in this area has been conducted in Western Christian cultures, Loewenthal focuses on the research evidence from other religions and cultures. She asks whether such evidence generates new perspectives on the problems and con- clusions. She illustrates her case by discussing four well-developed areas: somati- sation, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder and depression. Loewenthal’s analysis clearly demonstrates that religion and spirituality are neither “a univer- sal destroyer of wellbeing, nor a universal panacea”. The effects of religion and spirituality on wellbeing are many and varied, and can definitely be modulated by culture. Personality theories provide one of the main frameworks within which the indi- vidual differences approach to religion and spirituality operates. In Chapter 7, Leslie J. Francis provides an introduction to one personality theory that has been particu- larly influential in recent years in an awareness of the association between personality and ways of expressing religiosity and spirituality. This is the notion of psychological type as proposed by and modified and developed by assessment tools like the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and the Kiersey Tempera- ment Sorter. This model distinguishes between two orientations (introversion and extraversion), two perceiving functions (sensing and intuition), two judging func- tions (thinking and feeling) and two attitudes towards the outer world (judging and I The Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 11 perceiving). In this chapter, Leslie J. Francis draws on recent, empirical research concerned with profiling religious professionals, with profiling religious adherents and with examining the association between type preferences and preferred modes of spirituality. Research concerned with establishing the correlates of individual differences in levels of religiosity and spirituality has to confront the problem of the way in which these constructs are multidimensional. In Chapter 8, Leslie J. Francis distinguishes between distinct dimensions of religion and spirituality defined as self-assigned affiliation (the groups with which individuals identify), self-reported practices (the things that individuals do), beliefs (the cognitive aspect of religion and spirituality) and attitudes (the affective aspect of religion and spirituality. Then Francis pro- ceeds to argue for the primacy of the attitudinal dimension in accessing the core of an individual’s religion and spirituality. The chapter concludes by summarising a wide field of research concerned with establishing the correlates, antecedents and consequences of individual differences in the attitudinal dimension of religion and spirituality. In Chapter 9, Chris Baker offers a psychological perspective on the growing lit- erature concerned with the notions of social, religious and spiritual capital. These notions have their roots in thinkers like Coleman and Bourdieu and were brought to wider public attention by Putnam’s now classic study, Bowling alone (Putnam, 2000). Using the ideas of capitals, these notions trace the contributions made to individual lives and to society by social networks, by religious organisations and by the realm of spirituality. Drawing on original data generated by his association with the William Temple Foundation, Chris Baker profiles the considerable benefits to individuals and to society associated with religious and spiritual capitals. From the early and original work of William James (1902) in his classic study, The varieties of religious experience, researchers have been concerned with the experiential aspects of religion and spirituality. In Chapter 10, Ralph W. Hood Jr. discusses the variety of ways in which the terms religious and spiritual experience are employed in current discussion and how they are distinguished one from the other. Then Hood examines the implications for education and wellbeing of five recent research traditions concerned with deconversion, conversion, glossolalia, dif- ferent forms of prayer and meditation, and mysticism. In this last part, Hood draws on his own pioneering research, begun in the 1970s with the development of the Hood Mysticism Scale as a means of accessing and measuring responses to religious experience (Hood, 1975). Kenneth I Pargament is well-known within the fields of the psychology of reli- gion and spirituality for his original and pioneering research linking religion and coping strategies, as displayed in his book, The psychology of religion and cop- ing: Theory, research and practice (Pargament, 1997). In Chapter 11, Pargament suggests that religion is designed first and foremost to facilitate spirituality and to help people achieve spiritual goals. Building on this premise, he maintains that attempts to understand religion in purely biological, psychological or social terms can provide, at best, an incomplete picture and, at worst, a distorted view of reli- gious life. Demonstrating this point, Pargament presents a model for understanding 12 L.J. Francis spirituality as a normal and natural part of life. Then he examines the spiritual dimension of coping with life stressors within the context of that larger model of spirituality. The notion of the psychology of faith development is now closely linked with the pioneering empirical research and theory construction undertaken by James Fowler. In Chapter 12, Jeff Astley provides an overview of Fowler’s theory. He argues that, although the theoretical framework and the research support for it have both been vigorously critiqued, many educators, pastors and counsellors have found their own thinking illuminated by Fowler’s claims. Fowler uses the term “faith” in a wide, generic sense. According to Fowler, religious faith is only one species of human faith; it is faith directed to religious things, in particular to a transcendent God or gods. According to Fowler, everyone has his/her “gods” in the wider sense of realities and ideas that they value highly and to which they are committed including their health, wealth, security, family, ideologies and their own pleasure. In this chap- ter, Astley identifies the theological and psychological roots of Fowler’s theory, its empirical support and the critical literature that it has attracted. Then Astley traces the relevance of Fowler’s account of faith for those concerned with pastoral care, with spiritual counselling and with wider educational contexts. A number of early researchers concerned with the psychology of religion and spirituality identified prayer as being the core expression of what it means to be religious or spiritual (see Francis & Astley, 2001). Empirical research in these areas, however, was largely eclipsed until a renaissance in the 1990s. In Chapter 13, Tania ap Sionˆ and Leslie J. Francis present and evaluate three strands of the research that have re-established prayer as of central importance in understanding the role of religion and spirituality in human development and human functioning. The first strand of research is concerned with the subjective effects of prayer, looking at the correlates of prayer among those who engage in that activity. The second strand of research is concerned with the objective effects of prayer, giving particular attention to clinical trials of “prayer treatment”, examining the medical outcomes of patients who do not know that they are being prayed for. The third strand of research is concerned with the content of prayer as a window through which to view the religion and spirituality of ordinary people. The 13 chapters in this part of the handbook have all been written by acknowl- edged authorities in the particular aspect of the psychology of religion and spiritu- ality on which they have contributed. The editorial process has deliberately allowed the distinctive voices and perspectives of these authors to stand on their own terms. Contradictions of interpretation and discrepancies of evaluation simply serve to remind us that the psychology of religion and spirituality is an ongoing and devel- oping field of enquiry stimulated by debate, controversy and disagreement. Enough secure evidence has, however, been marshalled to make the irrefutable case that religion and spirituality matter a great deal in the fields of education, pastoral care and wellbeing. Practitioners within these applied fields are already able to draw valuable insights from the research literature. At the same time, the case has been clearly made for the value of investing further in the promotion of ongoing empirical I The Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 13 research, informed by the insights of psychology, into the correlates, antecedents and consequences of individual differences in religiosity and in spirituality.

References

Francis, L.J., & Astley, J. (Eds.). (2001). Psychological perspectives on prayer: A reader. Leominster: Gracewing. Hill, P. C., & Hood, R. W. (Eds.). (1999). Measures of religiosity. Birmingham, Alabama: Religious Education Press. Hood, R. W. (1975). The construction and preliminary validation of a measure of reported mystical experience. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 14, 29–41. James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience. New York: Longmans Green. Pargament, K. I. (1997). The psychology of religion and coping: Theory, research practice. New York: Guilford Press. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community.NewYork: Touchstone.