Measuring Spiritual Health: Spiritual Health Assessment Scale (SHAS)

Objective: To develop a spiritual health assessment scale to measure spiritual health

Materials and methods: The study was started with the definition of spiritual health and its review. The spiritual health assessment scale was developed after discussing its rationality. This scale contains three domains for assessment of spiritual health v.i.z. Self-development, Self-Actulization and Self-Realization. Each of the domains has seven items in itself, related to domain. Each of the item is given scoring of between ‘1’ to ‘5’ on Likert scale. Likewise, total spiritual health score ranges from ‘21’ to ‘105’. Poor spiritual health was considered when spiritual health score between ‘21’ to ‘49’, fair spiritual health was considered when spiritual health score between ‘50’ to ‘77’ and good spiritual health was considered when spiritual health score between ‘78’ to ‘105’ Applicability, reliability and validity of this scale was tested by applying it on randomly selected 1050 individuals of 20-60 years residing in Dausa city of Rajasthan.

Results: Applicability of this SHAS scale was 98.2%, test-retest reliability 81.14% and internal consistency validity 0.81. Discriminate validity to discriminate within poor, fair and good spiritual health was significant (P<0.001)

Conclusions: This scale can be used to measure spiritual health as it has good applicability, reliability and validity. It can be used for all sections of the community as it is not based on religion.