Citation
Kim, S.-H., King, P. E., & Trudeau, S. M. (2024). Spirituality and meaning-making across contexts: Structural topic modeling of the Fetzer spirituality study in the United States. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 16(2), 203–213.
Abstract
Given the significant shifts in religious affiliation and spiritual seeking over the last 20 years, a rigorous and updated understanding of how spirituality functions are essential to understand the impact of these changes on individuals and society. Drawing on an integrated view of spirituality informed by relational developmental systems (RDS) and meaning-making approaches, in the present study, we sought to identify commonalities within varied expressions of spirituality described within interviews of a religiously and spiritually diverse sample of adults. Structural topic modeling (STM) was applied to infer the latent themes inherent in the in-depth narratives of 16 participants from the Fetzer Institute’s (2020) Study of Spirituality in the United States. Following STM procedures, 1,298 terms were analyzed, resulting in a three-topic model as the best fit. We applied an RDS and contextual lens to name the topics: Individual, Transcendent, and Social, reflecting different systems in which spirituality is experienced. We found evidence that the process of making meaning is common to how people experience, understand, and then live out their spirituality. Our findings suggest that people experience spirituality when ascribing meaning and pursuing purposeful behaviors based on their transcendent beliefs and experiences at the individual, social, and transcendent levels. Our study sheds light on the importance and viability of considering diverse beliefs about and experiences of transcendence and provides unified and contrasting expressions of spirituality as it is lived out in the United States in the early 21st century through vivid descriptions from diverse lived experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Copyright
- Holder: American Psychological Association
- Year: 2022
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/rel0000496
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