Abstract
Religiosity and spirituality (R/S) are often regarded as being relatively stable over time. The present exploratory experience sampling method (ESM) study aims to assess the variability of three R/S parameters concerning affective representations of God and spiritual experiences in a psychiatric population. Depressed in- and outpatients self-identifying as being spiritual or religious participated, from two Dutch mental health care institutions. The twenty-eight participants rated momentary affective R/S-variables up to 10 times per day over a 6-day period when prompted by a mobile application. All three examined R/S parameters varied significantly within the day. ESM examination of R/S showed good compliance and little reactivity. This indicates that ESM offers a feasible, usable, and valid way to explore R/S in a psychiatric population.
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Data Availability
Due to privacy regulations the data cannot be made available. The research protocol and ESM-questionnaires are available as a supplement.
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Acknowledgements
We thank prof. dr. Marieke Wichers (Maastricht University and University Medical Center Groningen) for her most helpful comments on the study-protocol. We thank Ria Mulder (Eleos) for her technical assistance in data-collection.
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This study was supported by Stichting tot Steun VCVGZ (BvdB, Grant Number 242).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation and data collection were performed by BvdB and MJ, data analysis was performed by BvdB, MJ, and MD. The first draft of the manuscript was written by BvdB and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008. Approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of Universitair Medisch Centrum Groningen (2018/370). The authors affirm that human research participants provided informed consent for publication of the images in Fig. 1a, b and c.
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van den Brink, B., Jongkind, M., Wijzenbroek, W. et al. The Experience Sampling Method: A New Way of Assessing Variability of the Emotional Dimensions of Religiosity and Spirituality in a Dutch Psychiatric Population. J Relig Health 62, 3687–3701 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-023-01857-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-023-01857-w