Over the past decade there has been a growing trend in determining what role, if any, religiosity and spirituality has in the context of personality and subjective well-being. For instance, Piedmont [1] proposed an extension of the Five Factor Model of personality traits by presuming a sixth factor named ‘‘Spiritual Transcendence”. Moreover, Saroglou [2] reported a positive correlation between different parameters of religiosity and the Big-Five dimensions of Extraversion, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. However, facets like Extrinsic Religiosity were found to be associated with higher scores on the Neuroticism dimension. Although religious/spiritual issues tended to be negatively related with different indicators of mental illness, in most cases, the exact nature of the relationship between religiosity/spirituality and mental health is presently not well understood and needs to be explored in much more depth. Thus, it has been rightly criticised that religious/spiritual issues are often taken for granted as a positive correlate of mental health in general [3]. Finding a clear-cut definition for religion or spirituality, which can fit all perspectives, can become an issue of controversy. Within the discipline of psychology of religion, Pargament [4] provides an increasingly influential definition (p. 32): “I define religion as a process, a search for significance in ways related to the sacred.” Pargament argues strongly against the increasingly common tendency to split spirituality and religiosity into two distinct functions. A substantial number of psychometric measures, based on varying religious/spiritual backgrounds, have been developed for Anglo-American participants, as well as several scales for Europeans [5,6]. However, there is still a great demand for valid multidimensional measures to explore the different facets of religiosity and spirituality effectively.

The concept of “Spiritual Well-Being” was originally developed by Ellison and Paloutzian [7]. Subsequently other successful attempts were made to assess “Spiritual Well-Being” [8]. Based on this, the concept of Religious/Spiritual Well-Being (RSWB) was developed by an interdisciplinary clinical research group at the University Clinic in Graz, Austria. It was also the result of an attempt to expand the bio-psycho-social model with a religious/spiritual component [9,10]. A global definition of RSWB can be given as “the ability to experience and integrate meaning and purpose in existence through a connectedness with self, others or a power greater than oneself” [11]. As a first step, the difference between an immanent (bio-psycho-social) and a transcendent (religious-spiritual) field of perception was assumed; in the end an empirical model of RSWB, comprising six dimensions, could be established at the empirical level: Hope Immanent, Forgiveness, Experience of Sense and Meaning as parameters of well-being for the immanent area, Hope Transcendent, General Religiosity and Connectedness for the transcendent area. Dimensions such as Hope, Forgiveness, or Experiences of Sense and Meaning were always found to be substantially related to varying indicators of subjective well-being and might therefore be conceptualized as religious/spiritual dimensions as well as without any religious/spiritual connotation. The transcendent dimensions will require some further clarification: General Religiosity relates to a belief that is more institutionalised, bound to religious communities or traditions, whereas Connectedness is conceived as a more deinstitutionalized form of belief (e.g., someone who professes to be agnostic or simply spiritual). Hope Transcendent can be best described as the opposite of existential fear or the anxiety that people may exhibit towards death, for instance a belief in an afterlife that conforms to an idealised paradise. The whole list of the English items can be found in the Appendix enclosed herein. Furthermore, marker items are given as examples in order to illustrate the meaning of the different dimensions. General Religiosity: “My faith gives me a feeling of security”; Connectedness: “I have experienced the feeling of being absorbed into something greater”; Forgiveness: “There are things which I cannot forgive” (coded reversely); Experiences of Sense and Meaning: “I have experienced true (authentic) feelings”; Hope Immanent: “I view the future with optimism”; Hope Transcendent: “I often think about the fact that I will have to leave behind my loved ones” (coded reversely) [12].

The German MI-RSWB (MI-RSWB-G) was applied in several research projects and has been proven to display convincing psychometric properties [10]. Motivated by these promising results attained with the German version of the MI-RSWB, an English version of the scale was devised in order to facilitate research in this field for scientists beyond the German speaking countries. Here we present the first empirical results for the English version of the MI-RSWB (MI-RSWB-E) which were obtained in a sample of British college students. Based upon preliminary results it is hypothesised that the MI-RSWB-E shows similar factors and psychometric properties to the German original. For scale validation purposes, and also to discuss the concept within personality and health oriented research, dimensions of the MI-RSWB-E will be related to established measures for personality dimensions, subjective well-being and mental illness.

Mean and standard deviations (separately for both sexes) for all MI-RSWB-E sub-dimensions, as well as the total score, can be found in Table 1. All of the dimensions of MI-RSWB-E, except for Forgiveness, were found to be normally distributed. This was revealed by examining the skewness and the kurtosis of the raw score distributions of the MI-RSWB-E dimensions, along with tests for their goodness of fit (Kolmogorov Smirnov test). However, much like the German version, the dimensions of the MI-RSWB-E tended to be negatively skewed, indicating that individuals were more likely to agree to the items.

In the next step of our investigation the inter-correlations between the dimensions of the MI-RSWB-E were computed. As shown in Table 2, the MI-RSWB-E dimensions displayed comparatively high correlations with the total score, and they were weakly to moderately correlated with each other with the exception of Hope Transcendent; that was revealed to have comparatively low correlations with the other dimensions. An explorative factor analysis with VARIMAX rotation (due to the theoretical presuppositions we limited the factors to be extracted to six) yielded a six-factor solution, accounting for 55.05% of the total variance. The strongest factor measured was General Religiosity (eigenvalue: 11.41; 23.77% explained variance), followed by Connectedness (eigenvalue: 4.41; 9.19% explained variance), Meaning (eigenvalue: 4.07; 8.47% explained variance), Forgiveness (eigenvalue: 2.56; 5.34% explained variance), Hope Immanent (eigenvalue: 2.40; 5.00% explained variance) and lastly Hope Transcendent (eigenvalue: 1.57; 3.27% explained variance). As shown in Table 2, satisfying internal consistencies (Cronbach’s α) were found for the MI-RSWB-E, a result which was similar to the German version of the scale [10,11].

Further illustration of the development of the MI-RSWB-E can be attained by using structural equation modelling for Confirmative Factor Analysis while inspecting Figure 1. Correspondingly, the MI-RSWB-E dimension Hope Transcendent exhibited a comparatively low association with the MI-RSWB-E total score. General Religiosity and Connectedness also turned out to be the strongest predictors for the total score of MI-RSWB-E.

The amount of RSWB was found to increase significantly with age (r = 0.26, p < 0.001). Women appeared to exhibit somewhat higher religiosity/spirituality than men, although not significantly (r = 0.1, p = 0.06). In Table 3 the correlations between the MI-RSWB-E dimensions and the Big Five personality factors are shown, along with the correlations for the MI-RSWB-E with different indicators of subjective well-being and mental illness. Substantial positive correlations between the MI-RSWB-E dimensions and personality were found with respect to Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness (see Table 3). Specifically, there was a comparatively high positive correlation between the MI-RSWB-E dimension Forgiveness and Agreeableness. Also, Hope Immanent was observed to be substantially correlated with the personality dimensions Agreeableness and Extraversion and to a minor extent with conscientiousness. A similar pattern of results was found for the MI-RSWB-E dimension Experience of Sense and Meaning; this exhibited a comparatively strong correlation with the Big Five dimension openness. It is also noteworthy that there was a negative association between the total MI-RSWB-E score and Neuroticism (see Table 3).

Moreover, there were significant correlations between the total score of the Spiritual Well-Being scale (SWB-S) and all dimensions of the MI-RSWB-E, particularly with respect to General Religiosity, Forgiveness, Connectedness, and the total MI-RSWB-E score (see Table 3). Moreover, the SWB-S sub-dimensions Religious Well-Being and Existential Well-Being exhibited substantial correlations with the MI-RSWB-E dimensions (see Table 3). Indicators of Mental illness were mainly observed as being negatively associated with the MI-RSWB-E dimensions. As evident in Table 3, comparatively high correlations were observed for the MI-RSWB-E dimensions Hope Transcendent, Hope Immanent and Forgiveness (see Table 3).

In recent years the concept of Religious/Spiritual Well-being has been investigated vigorously, albeit by applying the German version of the MI-RSWB. In this context, the dimensions of the RSWB turned out to be substantially related with personality factors and with various indicators of subjective well-being and mental illness [12]. The newly adapted English version of this scale (MI-RSWB-E) shows a similar factor structure and psychometric properties with the German original [10]. Furthermore, as Table 3 reveals, substantial correlations were found between the MI-RSWB-E dimensions and personality factors as well as with indicators of mental health and illness. Corresponding to Saroglou [2], the Big Five personality dimensions Agreeableness and Conscientiousness turned out to be associated with the MI-RSWB-E, which parallels the results of the German version. However, somewhat contrary to our expectations, no correlation was found between Extraversion and the MI-RSWB-E. Moreover, analyses revealed a weak (negative) association between the RSWB and the personality dimension Neuroticism. In addition, the MI-RSWB-E sub-dimensions Hope and Forgiveness turned out to be strongly associated with indicators of subjective well-being (e.g., Existential Well-Being), which equals the results of MI-RSWB-G [10]. Contrary to our theoretical assumptions, Hope Transcendent was more strongly related to Existential Well-Being than to Religious Well-Being. The dimension Forgiveness was found to be substantially related to both Existential Well-Being and Religious Well-Being. General Religiosity and Connectedness were both found to be highly associated with Religious Well-Being. Thus, these two dimensions could be considered as two different kinds of belief systems. General Religiosity, in contrast to Connectedness, might be interpreted as being more strongly related to institutions, rites and traditions. Furthermore, in line with our assumptions, dimensions of MI-RSWB-E were found to be negatively associated with parameters of mental illness (see Table 3). Taken together, the findings of this study suggest that the English version of the MI-RSWB is equivalent to the MI-RSWB-G and might be considered as a reliable and valid tool for the assessment of different facets of religiosity and spirituality in personality and health oriented research.

There are several limitations which should be noted. First we administered the scales in two different ways: singly and in groups. However, controlling for test setting yielded no relevant result. It should also be mentioned that Heythrop College has an explicit religious/spiritual background as a Jesuit institution primarily devoted to the study of theology and philosophy. Thus, Heythrop students should not be seen as being representative of British students in general, since a higher degree of religiosity/spirituality amongst Heythrop students must be assumed. In this study we did not assess “ethnicity”, which could be assumed to be rather important for future research; for instance, among religious minorities, there might appear specific kinds of RSWB that would differ from those brought up in a Western European culture. The MI-RSWB-G was developed based on an Abrahamic/monotheistic religious background. Still, it is a problem unsolved: how would the scale work when applied to polytheistic believers? Moreover, since Heythrop has a higher proportion of mature/post graduate students, the student body at Heythrop is considerably older than that of other universities. There was a tendency for women to score higher in RSWB, as a result there was a positive association between RSWB and gender. However, this gender effect comes across more clearly by applying MI-RSWB-G. All MI-RSWB dimensions, except “Forgiveness”, were found to be normally distributed. We abandoned further transformations to gain artificial normal distribution. However, this point might be countered by adjusting the α-level in further research. Moreover, inspection of Table 1 reveals that there might also be some “ceiling”-effects of “Forgiveness”, especially in a highly religious population. As depicted in Figure 1, a poor model fit was achieved [17,18]. This mirrors the results for the German version and might be mainly caused by the “Hope Transcendent” sub-scale, which has consistently been shown to be the poorest predictor of the MI-RSWB total score. Future research might bring more insight as to whether this sub-scale should be included or not. However, at this point of test development we would like to keep it for the sake of completeness. In this paper we intended to present the first results for the English version of the MI-RSWB in a British university population; further research is needed to learn more about specific characteristics of MI-RSWB-E among various different populations.

By introducing the MI-RSWB-E to an English-speaking audience we hope to contribute to the continual development of this young and fledgling field of empirically oriented psychology of religion. As dimensions of religiosity and spirituality are becoming an increasingly important topic, there might be further applications for the MI-RSWB-E in clinical as well as non-clinical fields. In clinical surroundings the MI-RSWB-E might be useful as a diagnostic tool to evaluate the psychotherapeutic process, as for instance concepts of Hope or Forgiveness are becoming more and more recognised as important issues in psychotherapy [19]. In conclusion, the dimensions of religious/spiritual well-being were confirmed as forming a distinct research topic in the field of psychology of religion, but we would also like to suggest that there are possible links to the conceptual framework of Positive Psychology as well as research potential in Subjective Well-being [20]. Thus, further research within this broad conceptual background would be both highly desirable, and highly beneficial, for patients and counsellors alike.