Refining Research Questions on Pastoral Counseling Healing Methods
Alusine M. Kanu, D.A.
Refining research questions and directions to assess health and healing and religious practices are the purposes of this article. The refined questions posed are:
What assessment practices can pastoral counseling practitioners use to evaluate effectiveness in multi cultural settings?
Are pastoral counseling healing methods and practices universal?
Engaging and evaluating and disseminating results from cultural research are important components of the advancement and practice of pastoral counseling. The main goal is to develop indigenous counseling practices that have meaning and benefit people within a specific culture (Kim et al., 2006). The indigenous approach advocates the perspectives of both insiders and outsiders which necessitate multiple methodologies, qualitative and quantitative. The primary challenge is determining what is indigenous and how these practices can be incorporated in help and healing.
Qualitative research helps in understanding assessment with objective realities. Assessment of the individual's functioning and clinical judgment will lead to appro-priateness and validity realities. The creation of multi faceted depictions of community needs and assets and the potential for communities to access and benefit from results are best generated by qualitative research. Culturally competent qualitative research can be a powerful tool when it reflects the daily lives of participants in their own words, in their settings, and on their terms and religious influence. The research directions are refined with the emerging views that counseling and healing do not belong to any single cultural, national, or social group. The goal is more properly about the reinvention of counseling as a profession in a global context.
The research rationale is similar to a degree of previous questions with the premises that accurate assessment and treatment plans should honor the client's world view. The emphasis in the new set of questions are that healing traditions should incor-porate a religious criterion for assessing, analyzing and exploring the quality of the re-search and interpretation processes of diagnosing healing effects in pastoral counseling practice. Another similar direction from previous questions is that the methods of assessing healing practice should use a comparative approach, and the new questions stress religion as the primary means of the comparative approach.
It is important to recognize that modern day individuals belong to many cultures, so there is the potential for multiple conflicts in values and social expectations which make assessment practices difficult and complex. The meaning of constructs within a culture is of great interest, and those adhering to this perspective refute treating culture and cultural variables as independent of the person. Culture is viewed as an integral, important and inseparable part of the human mind.
To assess help and healing from a cultural perspective means "gaining a better understanding of oneself within a specific aspect of life" (Nystul, 2006), determining whether a spiritual orientation is healthy or unhealthy, and ascertaining whether the client's presenting issues are related to spiritual issues. This gain in self-understanding can lead to more valid treatment planning and a better choice of therapeutic interventions through a more accurate representation of the client's sense of self in the area of spiritual functioning.
The counseling profession would become more relevant locally and globally if counseling theories and practices are developed to be consistent with the religious practices of the local context. Promoting indigenous cultures may enrich our lives and also preserve our unique humanity. The methodology that pastoral counseling professionals use universally or in multi cultural practices with religious practices is the Assessment of Spiritual Functioning. Without incorporating religion into assessment there are construct biases when the construct method is not the same across cultural groups. Other biases might include the definition of the construct, how coping is defined, the behaviors assoc-iated with a particular construct, appropriateness, insufficient sampling, or relevant behaviors associated with a construct.
Religion is an important institutional network that binds people to one another and helps to maintain cultural bonds. However, the manner in which various religions organ-ize and connect people differs widely based on broadly categorized civilizations with specific details and uniqueness within religious and cultural tradition. It is important to note that no two individuals or groups hold identical beliefs and manifest uniform behaviors, and whatever characterizations we make about one culture or cultural group must be thought of as normative tendencies that vary rather than monolithic and uniform attributes. Nevertheless, several key elements distinguish each group from the other.
The concerns of the forces of universalism and cultural relativity include questions of ontological concerns with aspects of the nature of being, existence, and reality and what exists with epistemological questions of the nature, scope, and limitations of knowledge and how it is acquired. Given all the good things we know about what healthy religion has to offer the human community, the "Good News" of religious power leads in discovering what is Godly in our lives and inspires healing practices in lives of Godly character and Godly service.
It is clear there are many varied perceptions of illness and its causes and assessments in different cultures. Without religion's explanations, it is not yet clear whether these perceptions influence the experience of illness or require a different list of symptoms that are found specifically in one culture. The fact that lay people have their own system of causal attributions does not necessarily warrant revision of the scientific system of causes and classifications, although healers who share the lay system may be sought for relief.
There is no agreed-upon definition of spiritual health or the dynamics that make up spiritual functioning. The definitions range from the view that spirituality encompass-ses the appreciation of beauty, truth, unity and the sacred in life. Others define spirituality as the function of an individual's awareness of and striving for, transcendence, surrender, integration, and identity. Others view spirituality as the quest for meaning and mission in life, the search for harmony and wholeness in the universe and a belief in an all-loving presence as appropriate spiritual aims. Evert and Agee (1995, p. 291) offered the follow-ing dimensions of spirituality: (1) accuracy, (2) universality, (3) affirmation, (4) a univer-sal life source or divine presence, and (5) an operationalization of transcendence.
The term spirituality is worthy of contemplation. The diversity of the meanings attached to this word reflects its validity and importance but proves to be a challenge in its measurement. The initial step in developing any measure is some statement of what one is actually measuring. The research direction of assessment practices that are universal and with religious directions should give considerations of the options in the Quantitative Assess-ment of spiritual functioning as it provides data on identified criteria. The tentative choices may be presented to the client for discussion.
The choices are:
The Spiritual Assessment Inventory, designed by Hall and Edwards (1998) contains forty-three items that assess the awareness and quality of one's relation-ship with God. The "Quality" focuses on specifics, instability, grandiosity, awareness and realistic acceptance.
The Index of Core Spiritual Experiences was designed by Kass, Friedman, Lesserman, Zutterneister, and Benson (1991). This brief instrument measures experiences that convince the respondent of the existence of God and of the perception that God lives within each individual. The utility of this measure is limited to those professing a belief in a higher power, or God, or for those who are concerned about a lack of such experiences.
The Spiritual Well Being Scale (Ellison, 1983) is "the most researched instrument to date" (Standard et al., 2000, p. 207). It assesses the need for transcendence to the core human needs of having, relating, and being. The idea involves a commit-ment to a purpose that is related to the ultimate meaning of life.
The Spiritual Health Inventory (Veach, Chappel, 1992) is an instrument that measures four factors that influence spiritual health: (a) personal spiritual experience, (b) spiritual well being, (c) a sense of harmony, and (d) personal helplessness. The focuses are on the belief in God and experiences with God and the experience of spiritual awakening or spiritual health. The spiritual well being scale measures the benefits of an active relationship with a supreme being.
To better influence cultures with religion as the arbiter of health and healing, attention should be given to the Spiritual Wellness Inventory by Ingersoll (2001). Ingersoll developed a cross-spiritual model on spiritual wellness. The author determined how spiritual wellness would be manifested by a practitioner of each specific tradition and creates an instrument that measured spiritual wellness. The dimensions of spiritual wellness are (1) A conception of the absolute divine. This is in relation to the individual's image or experience of divinity; (2) Meaning, a sense of life that has purpose and is worth living; (3) Connectedness, A sense of spiritual belonging with other people, the Divine, or elements in the environment; (4) Mystery, a capacity for awe and wonder as one deals with ambiguity, the unexplained, and uncertainty in life; (5) Spiritual freedom which is a capacity for play, immersing oneself in life, and losing oneself in the moment; (6) Four comments on the Spirituality Scale (Howden, 1992) include unifying connec-tedness, purpose and meaning in life, innerness or inner resources, and transcendence; and (7) The Spirituality Index of Well Being (Frey, Dalleman, and Peyton, 2005) is a measure that was designed to assess two dimensions of spirituality linked to subjective well being, "life scheme" and "self efficacy".
Life scheme is a cognitive sense of one's world that provides a sense of order and purpose, which lends elements of comprehensibility, management, and meaningfulness to one's life. Self-efficacy is defined as an individual's belief in his or her ability to set a prescribed goal, organize resources toward that aim, and direct efforts to overcome individual problems. To best practice healing methods and how to assess them univer-sally, we should consider incorporating the preceding instruments as they play multiple contributing factors with concerns about the depth of understanding, both of one's past and the impact of one's past on current functioning with religion. The themes and patterns help counselors guide their clients' spiritual exploration free from the concern of identification. The instruments measure spiritual history, the affect, behavior and cognition.
With the Spiritual Life Map (Hodge, 2005), clients are offered great freedom of creative expression, so it is client-centered. The Life Map provides a unique opportunity for the counselor to remain in the questioning mode, with the client serving as the "expert" on his or her personal spiritual experience. Pastoral counseling researchers identify the type of biases that are likely to exert influence on their studies and make deliberate efforts to minimize their potential impact on designs and findings. Adhering to the cross-cultural approach with influences and contexts of religious practices will help in aligning different schools of thought and methodologies when assessing the goals of their efforts.
The research directions refine multi cultural evaluation, as complex and difficult to measure because of variations and uncertainties in assessing cultures and healing practices. To rectify these uncertainties is to embrace religion and its spiritual practices because only when we do can one best assess health and healing in genuine ways. It is important to recognize the complexity of defining a construct as vast and multi faceted as spirituality. Perhaps the most optimistic view would place this endeavor off to a good start with flexibility and striving to reinforce, refine, or join other credible measures of human functioning and interactions.
References
Ellison, C.W. (1983) "Spiritual well being: Conceptualization and measurement," Journal of Psychology and Theology, 11, 330-340.
Everts, J.F. and Agee, M.N. (1995). "Including spirituality in counselor education," Journal for the Advancement of Counseling, 27, 556-577.
Frey et al. (2005). "Measuring a dimension of spirituality for health research," Research on Aging, 27, 556-557.
Hall et al. (1998). "An empirical exploration of psychoanalysis and religion," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37, 305-315.
Hodge, D.R. (2005). "Spiritual assessment in marital and family therapy," Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 31, 341-356.
Howden, J.W. (1982). Development and Psychometric Characteristics of the Spiritual Assessment Scale.Denton,TX:Texas Women's University.
Ingersoll et al. (2001). The Spiritual Wellness Inventory: Explorations in Counseling and Spirituality.BelmontCA: Brooks/Cole, pp. 185-194.
Kass et al. (1991). "Health outcomes and a new index of spiritual experience," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 30, 203-211.
Kim, U. et al. (2006). Indigenous and Cultural Psychology: Understanding People in Context.New York: Springer, p. 51.
Nystul, M.S. (2006). Introduction to Counseling: An Art and Science Perspective. BostonMA: Pearson, p. 5.
Standard, R.P. et al. (2000). "Assessment of spirituality in counseling," Journal of Counseling and development, 78, 204-210.
Veach, T.L. et al. (1992). "Measuring spiritual health: A preliminary study," Substance Abuse, 13, 139-147.
Refining research questions and directions to assess health and healing and religious practices are the purposes of this article. The refined questions posed are:
What assessment practices can pastoral counseling practitioners use to evaluate effectiveness in multi cultural settings?
Are pastoral counseling healing methods and practices universal?
Engaging and evaluating and disseminating results from cultural research are important components of the advancement and practice of pastoral counseling. The main goal is to develop indigenous counseling practices that have meaning and benefit people within a specific culture (Kim et al., 2006). The indigenous approach advocates the perspectives of both insiders and outsiders which necessitate multiple methodologies, qualitative and quantitative. The primary challenge is determining what is indigenous and how these practices can be incorporated in help and healing.
Qualitative research helps in understanding assessment with objective realities. Assessment of the individual's functioning and clinical judgment will lead to appro-priateness and validity realities. The creation of multi faceted depictions of community needs and assets and the potential for communities to access and benefit from results are best generated by qualitative research. Culturally competent qualitative research can be a powerful tool when it reflects the daily lives of participants in their own words, in their settings, and on their terms and religious influence. The research directions are refined with the emerging views that counseling and healing do not belong to any single cultural, national, or social group. The goal is more properly about the reinvention of counseling as a profession in a global context.
The research rationale is similar to a degree of previous questions with the premises that accurate assessment and treatment plans should honor the client's world view. The emphasis in the new set of questions are that healing traditions should incor-porate a religious criterion for assessing, analyzing and exploring the quality of the re-search and interpretation processes of diagnosing healing effects in pastoral counseling practice. Another similar direction from previous questions is that the methods of assessing healing practice should use a comparative approach, and the new questions stress religion as the primary means of the comparative approach.
It is important to recognize that modern day individuals belong to many cultures, so there is the potential for multiple conflicts in values and social expectations which make assessment practices difficult and complex. The meaning of constructs within a culture is of great interest, and those adhering to this perspective refute treating culture and cultural variables as independent of the person. Culture is viewed as an integral, important and inseparable part of the human mind.
To assess help and healing from a cultural perspective means "gaining a better understanding of oneself within a specific aspect of life" (Nystul, 2006), determining whether a spiritual orientation is healthy or unhealthy, and ascertaining whether the client's presenting issues are related to spiritual issues. This gain in self-understanding can lead to more valid treatment planning and a better choice of therapeutic interventions through a more accurate representation of the client's sense of self in the area of spiritual functioning.
The counseling profession would become more relevant locally and globally if counseling theories and practices are developed to be consistent with the religious practices of the local context. Promoting indigenous cultures may enrich our lives and also preserve our unique humanity. The methodology that pastoral counseling professionals use universally or in multi cultural practices with religious practices is the Assessment of Spiritual Functioning. Without incorporating religion into assessment there are construct biases when the construct method is not the same across cultural groups. Other biases might include the definition of the construct, how coping is defined, the behaviors assoc-iated with a particular construct, appropriateness, insufficient sampling, or relevant behaviors associated with a construct.
Religion is an important institutional network that binds people to one another and helps to maintain cultural bonds. However, the manner in which various religions organ-ize and connect people differs widely based on broadly categorized civilizations with specific details and uniqueness within religious and cultural tradition. It is important to note that no two individuals or groups hold identical beliefs and manifest uniform behaviors, and whatever characterizations we make about one culture or cultural group must be thought of as normative tendencies that vary rather than monolithic and uniform attributes. Nevertheless, several key elements distinguish each group from the other.
The concerns of the forces of universalism and cultural relativity include questions of ontological concerns with aspects of the nature of being, existence, and reality and what exists with epistemological questions of the nature, scope, and limitations of knowledge and how it is acquired. Given all the good things we know about what healthy religion has to offer the human community, the "Good News" of religious power leads in discovering what is Godly in our lives and inspires healing practices in lives of Godly character and Godly service.
It is clear there are many varied perceptions of illness and its causes and assessments in different cultures. Without religion's explanations, it is not yet clear whether these perceptions influence the experience of illness or require a different list of symptoms that are found specifically in one culture. The fact that lay people have their own system of causal attributions does not necessarily warrant revision of the scientific system of causes and classifications, although healers who share the lay system may be sought for relief.
There is no agreed-upon definition of spiritual health or the dynamics that make up spiritual functioning. The definitions range from the view that spirituality encompass-ses the appreciation of beauty, truth, unity and the sacred in life. Others define spirituality as the function of an individual's awareness of and striving for, transcendence, surrender, integration, and identity. Others view spirituality as the quest for meaning and mission in life, the search for harmony and wholeness in the universe and a belief in an all-loving presence as appropriate spiritual aims. Evert and Agee (1995, p. 291) offered the follow-ing dimensions of spirituality: (1) accuracy, (2) universality, (3) affirmation, (4) a univer-sal life source or divine presence, and (5) an operationalization of transcendence.
The term spirituality is worthy of contemplation. The diversity of the meanings attached to this word reflects its validity and importance but proves to be a challenge in its measurement. The initial step in developing any measure is some statement of what one is actually measuring. The research direction of assessment practices that are universal and with religious directions should give considerations of the options in the Quantitative Assess-ment of spiritual functioning as it provides data on identified criteria. The tentative choices may be presented to the client for discussion.
The choices are:
The Spiritual Assessment Inventory, designed by Hall and Edwards (1998) contains forty-three items that assess the awareness and quality of one's relation-ship with God. The "Quality" focuses on specifics, instability, grandiosity, awareness and realistic acceptance.
The Index of Core Spiritual Experiences was designed by Kass, Friedman, Lesserman, Zutterneister, and Benson (1991). This brief instrument measures experiences that convince the respondent of the existence of God and of the perception that God lives within each individual. The utility of this measure is limited to those professing a belief in a higher power, or God, or for those who are concerned about a lack of such experiences.
The Spiritual Well Being Scale (Ellison, 1983) is "the most researched instrument to date" (Standard et al., 2000, p. 207). It assesses the need for transcendence to the core human needs of having, relating, and being. The idea involves a commit-ment to a purpose that is related to the ultimate meaning of life.
The Spiritual Health Inventory (Veach, Chappel, 1992) is an instrument that measures four factors that influence spiritual health: (a) personal spiritual experience, (b) spiritual well being, (c) a sense of harmony, and (d) personal helplessness. The focuses are on the belief in God and experiences with God and the experience of spiritual awakening or spiritual health. The spiritual well being scale measures the benefits of an active relationship with a supreme being.
To better influence cultures with religion as the arbiter of health and healing, attention should be given to the Spiritual Wellness Inventory by Ingersoll (2001). Ingersoll developed a cross-spiritual model on spiritual wellness. The author determined how spiritual wellness would be manifested by a practitioner of each specific tradition and creates an instrument that measured spiritual wellness. The dimensions of spiritual wellness are (1) A conception of the absolute divine. This is in relation to the individual's image or experience of divinity; (2) Meaning, a sense of life that has purpose and is worth living; (3) Connectedness, A sense of spiritual belonging with other people, the Divine, or elements in the environment; (4) Mystery, a capacity for awe and wonder as one deals with ambiguity, the unexplained, and uncertainty in life; (5) Spiritual freedom which is a capacity for play, immersing oneself in life, and losing oneself in the moment; (6) Four comments on the Spirituality Scale (Howden, 1992) include unifying connec-tedness, purpose and meaning in life, innerness or inner resources, and transcendence; and (7) The Spirituality Index of Well Being (Frey, Dalleman, and Peyton, 2005) is a measure that was designed to assess two dimensions of spirituality linked to subjective well being, "life scheme" and "self efficacy".
Life scheme is a cognitive sense of one's world that provides a sense of order and purpose, which lends elements of comprehensibility, management, and meaningfulness to one's life. Self-efficacy is defined as an individual's belief in his or her ability to set a prescribed goal, organize resources toward that aim, and direct efforts to overcome individual problems. To best practice healing methods and how to assess them univer-sally, we should consider incorporating the preceding instruments as they play multiple contributing factors with concerns about the depth of understanding, both of one's past and the impact of one's past on current functioning with religion. The themes and patterns help counselors guide their clients' spiritual exploration free from the concern of identification. The instruments measure spiritual history, the affect, behavior and cognition.
With the Spiritual Life Map (Hodge, 2005), clients are offered great freedom of creative expression, so it is client-centered. The Life Map provides a unique opportunity for the counselor to remain in the questioning mode, with the client serving as the "expert" on his or her personal spiritual experience. Pastoral counseling researchers identify the type of biases that are likely to exert influence on their studies and make deliberate efforts to minimize their potential impact on designs and findings. Adhering to the cross-cultural approach with influences and contexts of religious practices will help in aligning different schools of thought and methodologies when assessing the goals of their efforts.
The research directions refine multi cultural evaluation, as complex and difficult to measure because of variations and uncertainties in assessing cultures and healing practices. To rectify these uncertainties is to embrace religion and its spiritual practices because only when we do can one best assess health and healing in genuine ways. It is important to recognize the complexity of defining a construct as vast and multi faceted as spirituality. Perhaps the most optimistic view would place this endeavor off to a good start with flexibility and striving to reinforce, refine, or join other credible measures of human functioning and interactions.
References
Ellison, C.W. (1983) "Spiritual well being: Conceptualization and measurement," Journal of Psychology and Theology, 11, 330-340.
Everts, J.F. and Agee, M.N. (1995). "Including spirituality in counselor education," Journal for the Advancement of Counseling, 27, 556-577.
Frey et al. (2005). "Measuring a dimension of spirituality for health research," Research on Aging, 27, 556-557.
Hall et al. (1998). "An empirical exploration of psychoanalysis and religion," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37, 305-315.
Hodge, D.R. (2005). "Spiritual assessment in marital and family therapy," Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 31, 341-356.
Howden, J.W. (1982). Development and Psychometric Characteristics of the Spiritual Assessment Scale.Denton,TX:Texas Women's University.
Ingersoll et al. (2001). The Spiritual Wellness Inventory: Explorations in Counseling and Spirituality.BelmontCA: Brooks/Cole, pp. 185-194.
Kass et al. (1991). "Health outcomes and a new index of spiritual experience," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 30, 203-211.
Kim, U. et al. (2006). Indigenous and Cultural Psychology: Understanding People in Context.New York: Springer, p. 51.
Nystul, M.S. (2006). Introduction to Counseling: An Art and Science Perspective. BostonMA: Pearson, p. 5.
Standard, R.P. et al. (2000). "Assessment of spirituality in counseling," Journal of Counseling and development, 78, 204-210.
Veach, T.L. et al. (1992). "Measuring spiritual health: A preliminary study," Substance Abuse, 13, 139-147.
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