Is "Spirituality" nothing but "Religion"? An Indirect Measurement Approach

Klein C, Hood RW, Silver CF, Keller B, Streib H. Is "Spirituality" nothing but "Religion"? An Indirect Measurement Approach. In: Streib H, Hood RW, eds. Semantics and Psychology of "Spirituality". A Cross-cultural Analysis. Cham, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht: Springer International Publishing Switzerland; 2016: 71-85.While people might distinguish strictly between “spirituality” and “reli-gion” on the explicit level of cognition, it is possible that such differences disap-pear on the implicit level. Implicit Association Tests (IATs) provide a reliable and valid indirect procedure to measure implicit cognition. However, IATs comparing “spirituality” and “religion” have not been used often in research yet. Earlier stud-ies have tried to contrast both concepts either directly in one IAT or have used both concepts as a single category. Thus, in their operationalization they did not take the broadness, vagueness, and partial overlap of both terms into account satisfyingly. For a more valid comparison, in the Bielefeld-based Cross-cultural Study on “Spirituality,” both “spirituality” and “religion” have been assessed by using the same stimuli and have been contrasted with “atheism” as a third concept. The results based on a subsample of 104 participants (USA: n = 67, Germany: n = 37) show that the task difficulties were reasonable and that both IATs proved to be reliable. The general IAT effects were .33 (USA) and .36 (Germany) for “spirituality” and .26 (USA) and .22 (Germany) for “religion,” indicating a preference for both “spirituality” and “religion” when contrasted with “atheism.” The effect sizes differ in parts significantly between four groups of explicit “spiritual/religious” self-identification in both countries. Explicit “spiritual”/“religious” self-identifications correlate highly significant with the IAT effects for “spirituality” and “religion.” Although, in general, the IAT scores are also very highly correlated, comparison between the four subgroups revealed that explicit self-description and implicit attitude towards “spirituality” differ significantly among those who distinguish between their “spirituality” and “religion” on the explicit level