Influence of Religious Practice and Church Interpersonal Trust on Spiritual Experience during COVID-19 Pandemic

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

First - I appreciate you taking on this topic as I see that there is much to be said about the spiritual experiences of people during and post pandemic. You offer some good research findings and I think your conversation piece adds some depth to the ongoing conversation. 

Even so, there are some restructuring that this paper needs that would help in its presentation. There are places that do not adequately outline what they need to do (research and methods) and I do believe that you could find more up to date data on spirituality that would better serve the conversation. I also see that there are a few places that it would make sense to delete or move them around, helping to highlight your research question and overall flow of your paper. 

You present the data well - but why data from a dissertation? Is this your own data? 

I also would like to see some practical conclusion points: so what? - what would you propose (go into greater detail) to the community moving forward? - inside and outside academia? 

Again, good foundation here. With a slight re-working and updated organization and some added details, this would be a publishable piece. I look forward to seeing you work it out/revised. I think it will offer a good piece for others to reference as they think through these findings in conversation with their own experience. 

See attached for more comments/details. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to read your manuscript. It has potential, but I see a number of serious flaws. In my comments I will only address these and will skip minor issues I've encountered.

The study departs from the theological premise that community is necessary for Christian spirituality and spiritual experience. It is hypothesized in the introduction that interpersonal trust mediates the relationship between church membership or religious practice and spiritual experience. Though I think the argumentation is quite weak, at face value this hypothesis makes sense. It is unclear from the introduction what the relevance of the COVID19 pandemic is in this study. 

The authors have used decision tree analysis to determine the predictors of spiritual experience. For several reasons, I think this is an inappropriate choice. In my view, regression analysis would suffice and might even perform better. The authors suggest that decision tree analysis is fitting because they want to do an exploratory study with many variables that do not follow a normal distribution. However, many studies in various countries have already examined predictors for spiritual experiences, so I see no reason why an exploratory analysis would be necessary. Also, in my view, they present a clear hypothesis around interpersonal trust in the introduction section which contradicts the necessity of an exploratory study. In addition, - in line with the nature of decision tree analysis - most of the variables used are categorical variables, but I see no evidence in paragraph 2.2 and table 1 that the distribution of the sample over the categories is very uneven. The exception is religious affiliation with family members, which should therefore not be included in any type of analysis as a predictor. So non-normality of distributions also does not hold-up as an argument for decision-tree analysis. The study includes only 14 variables, judging from table 1. This is by no means a high number of variables that could not be handled with regression analysis. Finally, there are only 600 participants in the study. So a data mining approach seems completely unnecessary. To add to this, as I understand it, decision tree analysis requires a categorical 'dependent variable' or decision outcome. However, it seems the authors have used spiritual experience as a continous variable. Therefore, I recommend that the authors just perform a simple step-wise regression analysis or structural equation modeling to test the relationship between interpersonal trust and spiritual experience. If the authors are still concerned about spuriousness in the analysis, they should resolve this by removing the spurious variables. To the extent that I understand the method, decision tree analysis does not necessarily remedy this problem.

If the objective of the decision tree analysis was to examine the interdependence of the various variables (which I gather from paragraph 3.2), it might be more appropriate, but then some of my concerns about the quality of the analysis still stand and the argumentation for this should be made much clearer throughout the manuscript. Also, in that case I don't see the relevance of the univariate analyses described in paragraph 3.1 or why the variables are discussed independently again in section 4.

To summarize, I think the question of who has a higher chance of spiritual experiences as operationalized with the DSES is a worthwile question, but for the current manuscript to sufficiently contribute to this discussion the following is needed: 

* A clearer indication of the purpose of the study

* A better argumentation for the hypothesis being tested

* A better argumentation for the choice of analytical strategy

* A higher quality application of the analytical strategy

* A more consistent application of the findings in the discussion section and conclusion

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the attending to the details of the suggested edits. I also appreciate the clarification on some of the points. I am happy to endorse this work for publication and continue to encourage you to expand on this work in discerning an answer to the question on practical applications or the 'so, what?' question.