Date of Conferral

1979

Abstract

The Problem. The problem was to determine whether or not significant change in spirituality occurred in people who attended a Life, Death, and Transition workshop during the period June 1977 through February 1979.

Procedures. To measure change in spirituality, an instrument, the Spirituality Change Survey, was designed and tested. The instrument, which contained seven open-ended items and eleven semantic differential items, was determined to have moderately high internal reliability, 0.759, based on Coefficient Alpha. Two forms of the instrument were used, Eighty-seven participants from two workshops responded to a pretest- posttest mode, while 157 participants from eleven additional workshops responded to a mailed version. The open-ended items asked respondents to subjectively evaluate their perception of change in attitudes toward death, life, spirituality, themselves, others, values, and the workshop. They were then requested to indicate on each of eleven scales a numerical perception of their relative position, both prior to, and after, the workshop. A jury of five qualified judges converted the open-ended responses into numerical values based on the degree of change indicated, The data were then analyzed based on frequency distribution, shift in central tendency, and one way analysis of variance based on each demographic variable available.

Findings. It was determined that significant positive change did occur in persons attending the workshops. This was best illustrated by the total responses to open-ended items, with 1322 of 1613, or approximately 82 percent, being positive. No correlation between the time interval since attendance and response to the survey was found. A possible correlation between poor health and the degree of positive change in spirituality reported was indicated.

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