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Lay Conceptualizations of Spirituality and Religiousness Among Jewish Israeli Men and Women

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Review of Religious Research

Abstract

In order to clarify the lay conceptualization of spirituality and the overlap between the constructs of spirituality and religiousness, the relations between a multidimensional measure of spirituality and overall measures of spirituality and religiousness were examined. A total of 111 Israeli Jewish men and women responded to the Spiritual Orientation Inventory (SOI), a multidimensional measure of humanistic spirituality, and to single-item overall measures of spirituality and religiousness. For both men and women, all SOI sub-scales were significantly related to spirituality. In contrast, three SOI sub-scales—Altruism, Idealism, and Awareness of the tragic—were not related to religiousness. Regression analysis indicated that for men, spirituality is a more one-dimensional construct strongly associated with the experiential aspects of spirituality. In comparison, women demonstrated a more complex perception of spirituality associated with a variety of intrinsic spiritual values. In addition, for men the overlap between religiousness and spirituality centers on life coherency whereas for women the overlap appears to be more general.

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Notes

  1. Statistics on Israeli society are available from the Social Survey Table generator of the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics website http://surveys.cbs.gov.il/Survey/surveyAlt.htm.

  2. The reliability coefficients for two SOI scales—Sacredness of life and Awareness of the tragic—were below .60. Awareness of tragic has demonstrated similar reliabilities in previous studies using the SOI on a sample of Israeli Jews (e.g., Lazar 2009, 2010). In addition, this measure is based on only three items so that deleting items to improve scale reliability was not a viable option. The reliability of the Sacredness of life measure could have been improved by deleting two items. However, after rerunning all of the statistical analyses, the results were virtually identical excepting some minor differences to be expected due to any change in the data. In any case, no significant differences were uncovered regarding the role of this measure. Therefore, for the sake of consistency with previous research, I decided to retain the original five-item measure.

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  1. Department of Behavioral Sciences, Ariel University, 40700, Ariel, Israel

    Aryeh Lazar

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Lazar, A. Lay Conceptualizations of Spirituality and Religiousness Among Jewish Israeli Men and Women. Rev Relig Res 56, 107–128 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-013-0130-5

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