This application pertains to research objective number 23: Care For Older People.
The specific aim i s to identify potential items that will be included in a measure of health-related spirituality. Living a spiritual life may be a new protective factor for aging individuals, but documentation of its relationship to morbidity and mortality requires reliable and valid measures of spirituality that are generalizable across diverse religious and non-religious groups. Six virtues of spirituality have been identified-discipline, inner peace, joy, love, selflessness, and interconnectedness-which are basic to the teachings of 5 major religious traditions. We hypothesize that these virtues will be associated with behaviors and feelings that occur with some regularity throughout daily life and have plausible physiological links to health. Six individuals from each of 8 spiritual/religious groups (White Protestant, Black Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and 'spiritual but not religious'), who are over the age of 40 and who have been identified as being """"""""deeply spiritual,"""""""" will be interviewed. To control for social desirability bias, an additional 12 individuals will be identified who are """"""""not at all spiritual or religious"""""""" and divergence in responses will be identified. Qualitative data analyses will identify draft items that are: (1) everyday behaviors and feelings; (2) consistent with the 6 spiritual virtues; (3) evident across the diverse religious/spiritual groups; and (4) uncommon among non- religious/non-spiritual individuals. This draft questionnaire will be given to a development sample of 300 men and women over 40 years of age who are participants in ongoing population-based studies. An R01 will then be written to conduct psychometric analyses on the draft questionnaire, introduce it into 4 major prospective studies (the Women's Health Initiative, the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation, the Chicago Health and Aging Project, and the ENRICHD clinical trial), and study its validity as a correlate of pathogenic mechanisms and a predictor of total, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality.
