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The International NERSH Data Pool of Health Professionals’ Attitudes Toward Religiosity and Spirituality in 12 Countries

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Abstract

The amount of research concerned with the values of health professionals (HPs) is steadily growing. Around the world HPs face similar challenges when patients express their existential and spiritual views. How HPs engage these views, and the degree of embedment into consultations, differ across cultures. Today, more than ever before, researchers in this field need to share experiences and build new knowledge upon local findings. To meet this demand, we founded the international collaboration “Network for Research on Spirituality and Health” (https://NERSH.org). One of the central projects of our network has been to build a large international data pool of health professionals’ attitudes toward religiosity and spirituality. Today the data pool hosts answers from more than 6,000 health professionals from 17 separate surveys derived from 12 countries. Data were gathered by either the questionnaire “Religion and Spirituality in Medicine, Perspectives of Physicians” (RSMPP) or its successor ‘NERSH Questionnaire’. In this article we describe the methodology behind the construction of the data pool. We also present an overview of five available scales related to HP religiosity and spirituality, including a description of scale reliability and dimensionality.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Farr A. Curlin for his work within this field of research and not least for the development of the RSMPP upon which the NERSH data pool rests. Also, Curlin contributed with the American dataset included in data pool. Several NERSH collaborators have contributed to the NERSH data pool with local samples for which we are very grateful: Andreas Schulze, Inga Wermuth, Christian Balslev van Randwijk, Can Kuseyri, and Tryphon Mukwayakala. We also wish to acknowledge head of the Research Department of General Practice, Odense, Denmark, Jesper Nielsen, and Jens Søndergaard for hosting the NERSH data pool and facilitating research in this field.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Unit of General Practice, Institute of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark, C 5000, Odense, Denmark

    Alex Kappel Kørup, Jens Søndergaard & Niels Christian Hvidt

  2. Department of Mental Health Kolding-Vejle, University of Southern Denmark, 7100, Vejle, Denmark

    Alex Kappel Kørup

  3. College of Medicine, King Saud University (KSU), Riyadh, 11461, Saudi Arabia

    Nada A. Alyousefi

  4. Department of Medicine, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Avenida Eugênio de Nascimento s/n-Aeroporto, Juiz de Fora, MG, 36038330, Brazil

    Giancarlo Lucchetti

  5. Caritas Science and Christian Social Work, Faculty of Theology, Albert-Ludwig-University, 79085, Freiburg, Germany

    Klaus Baumann & Eunmi Lee

  6. Center for Social Cohesion, Catholic University of Daegu, Hayang-Ro 13-13, Hayang-Eup, Gyeongsan-si, Gyeongbuk, Republic of Korea, 38430

    Eunmi Lee

  7. Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Airlangga, Dr. Soetomo General Hospital, Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia

    Azimatul Karimah

  8. Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Parameshwaran Ramakrishnan

  9. AdiBhat Foundation, New Delhi, 110048, India

    Parameshwaran Ramakrishnan

  10. Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, Research Centre Spiritual Care, The University Hospital, Klinikum Rechts Der Isar, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Langerstr. 3, 81675, Munich, Germany

    Eckhard Frick

  11. Munich School of Philosophy, Kaulbachstr. 31, 80539, Munich, Germany

    Eckhard Frick

  12. Institute of Integrative Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Herdecke University, Gerhard-Kienle-Weg 4, Herdecke, 58313, Witten, Germany

    Arndt Büssing

  13. Medical Faculty, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, 81377, München, Germany

    Esther Schouten

  14. School of Divinity, King’s College, University of Aberdeen, 81377, München, Germany

    Wyatt Butcher

  15. Research Institute for Spirituality and Health, Weissensteinstrasse 30, 4900, Langenthal, Switzerland

    René Hefti

  16. Medical Faculty, University of Bern, Basel, Switzerland

    René Hefti

  17. Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Munich, 81377, München, Germany

    Inga Wermuth

Authors
  1. Alex Kappel Kørup
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  2. Jens Søndergaard
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  3. Nada A. Alyousefi
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  4. Giancarlo Lucchetti
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  5. Klaus Baumann
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  6. Eunmi Lee
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  7. Azimatul Karimah
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  8. Parameshwaran Ramakrishnan
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  9. Eckhard Frick
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  10. Arndt Büssing
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  11. Esther Schouten
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  12. Wyatt Butcher
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  13. René Hefti
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  14. Inga Wermuth
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  15. Niels Christian Hvidt
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Contributions

Alex Kappel Kørup wrote the article, conceived, designed, and performed the synchronization of the local data collections and conducted statistical analysis including reliability tests and factor analysis. Jens Søndergaard hosts the NERSH-database, contributed to research oversight, and contributed to critical manuscript revision. Nada A. AlYousefi conceived, designed, performed the survey in Saudi Arabian, and contributed to critical manuscript revision. Giancarlo Lucchetti conceived, designed, and performed the Brazilian surveys (physicians, medical residents and nurses) and contributed to critical manuscript revision. Klaus Baumann conceived, designed, performed a German survey in Freiburg, was co-founder of the NERSH-Network, and contributed to critical manuscript revision. With Klaus Baumann, Eunmi Lee conceived, designed, and performed a German survey in Freiburg and South Korea, and contributed to critical manuscript revision. Azimatul Karimah conceived, designed, performed the Indonesian survey and contributed to critical manuscript revision. Parameshwaran Ramakrishnan conceived, designed, and performed the Indian survey and contributed to critical manuscript revision; Eckhard Frick, co-founded the NERSH-Network, conceived, designed, performed a local survey as well as contributed to critical manuscript revision. Arndt Büssing co-founded of the NERSH-Network, contributed to critical manuscript revision, and performed reliability analyses in the first evaluation round. René Hefti conceived, designed and performed the Swiss survey, and contributed to critical manuscript revision. Wyatt Butcher conceived, designed and performed the New Zealand survey, and contributed to critical manuscript revision. Niels Christian Hvidt is responsible for project conception, is a co-founder and coordinator of the NERSH-Network, and contributed to critical manuscript revision.

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Correspondence to Alex Kappel Kørup.

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Kørup, A.K., Søndergaard, J., Alyousefi, N.A. et al. The International NERSH Data Pool of Health Professionals’ Attitudes Toward Religiosity and Spirituality in 12 Countries. J Relig Health 60, 596–619 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-020-01077-6

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