Bridging Disciplinary Boundaries (January 11 - 14, 2007)

Purpose: Religious/spiritual practices and beliefs are important to Americans, and research has found individual religiousness/spirituality to be associated with a wide variety of indicators of health and well-being. Because religiousness/spirituality is multi-dimensional, researchers are concerned with how best to describe individuals' religious/spiritual orientation and practices. This study's aim was to develop an empirically based typology of religiousness/spirituality that takes into account several dimensions of practice and behavior and to examine the relationship of membership in the categories of the typology with socio-demographic characteristics and measures of well-being. Methods: We developed a typology using data from the 1998 General Social Survey. The survey, administered to a national random sample of 1,445 adults, included the Brief Multidimensional Measures of Religiousness/Spirituality for use in Health Research developed by the National Institute on Aging/Fetzer Institute Working Group. We used two of the scales (Daily Spiritual Experience and Positive Religious Coping), a two-item measure of frequency of prayer/religious meditation, and a one-item measure of frequency of religious service attendance. Our analyses used the 1,209 participants who responded to all of the religiousness/spirituality questions. We used v-fold cross-validation to identify the number of clusters and k-means cluster analysis to place individuals within the typology created. We described the clusters by age, gender, race, marital status, educational attainment, and SES. Finally, we examined the relationships among cluster membership and measures of health and well-being, controlling for socio-demographic characteristics. Results: We identified five clusters. The highly religious (24.1%) scored highest on all measures of religiousness/spirituality. The somewhat religious (22.2%) scored slightly below the overall means on all measures. The non-religious (16.6%) scored at least one SD below the overall means on all measures. A fourth group (18.0%) labeled religious/spiritual non-attenders was similar in profile to the highly religious but scored significantly below the overall mean on religious service attendance. A fifth group (ritually religious) attended services at nearly the rate of the highly religious but scored near the overall mean on all other measures. This last group comprised 19.9% of participants. The highly religious were older and more likely to be female, Black, and married. They were most likely to be very happy and to find life exciting. The non-religious were most likely to be male, least likely to be Black, and least likely to be married. They were also the group least likely to be happy and to find life exciting. Implications: This study provides social workers with information about socio-demographic and health/mental health differences among people who have varying religiousness/spirituality profiles. Knowledge about clients' differing religiousness/spirituality profiles can help social workers target both faith-based and non faith-based social services in ways that are culturally sensitive. Further, better understanding of clients' religiousness/spirituality profiles can help social workers collaborate with clergy and pastoral counselors in providing services. Future research should explore the relationships between religiousness/spirituality profiles and other characteristics important to social workers (e.g., parenting attitudes and behaviors, substance use and abuse, orientations to end-of-life care, and additional indicators of health and mental health).