Can spiritual wellness predict preventive care behavior?
Abstract
The purpose of this study was two-fold—to determine the relationship between spiritual well-being and participation in health promoting/health preventive behaviors and to determine the extent to which spiritual well-being could predict participation in said behaviors among members of a mid-west Baptist church. It was hypothesized that a moderate yet significant relationship would exist between spiritual well-being and participation in health promoting/health preventive behaviors (moderate exercise frequency, vigorous exercise participation, vigorous exercise frequency, and healthy eating) and that spiritual well-being could predict to a moderate degree participation in these behaviors. Using the Spiritual Well-Being Scale (SWBS) by Paloutzian and Ellison (1983) to assess spiritual well-being and a modified version of the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the Health Status Survey, to measure participation in health promoting behaviors, logistic and multiple regression analyses were employed to statistically resolve this study’s two primary questions. Controlling for age, sex, income, and education, no statistically significant relationship between the predictor variables and dependent variables were found. Consequently, the null hypothesis could not be rejected. However, lack of response variability and statistically incompatible instrumentation posed significant problems to data analysis and likely explain the failure to reject the null hypothesis. Using population-appropriate and statistically compatible instruments, future research addressing the relationship between spiritual wellness and health behaviors is needed. Ensuring such conditions would foster adequate response variability, statistical consistency and clarity, and useful findings. Nevertheless, among the study sample using said instruments, spiritual well-being did not significantly correlate with any of the four assessed health promoting behaviors and did not explain any variance in participation in these behaviors.
Degree
M.S.
Advisors
Lyle, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Public health|Spirituality
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