Spirituality and Religiosity as Cross-Cultural Aspects of Human Experience

This study evaluated the validity of western spirituality and religiosity constructs in a nonwestern culture. The Faith Maturity Scale, Religiosity Index, and measures of the Five-Factor Model of Personality, purpose in life, altruism, self-actualization, subjective well-being, individualism-collectivism, and materialism were administered to 654 Filipino nationals. Results indicated that the Faith Maturity Scale and Religiosity Index were reliable and valid in the Philippine sample. Furthermore, among four competing structural equation models of potential causal relations among spirituality, religiosity, and psychological flourishing (SEM A, B, C, and D), Models B and D demonstrated exact fit via the chi square test. SEM D, which specified spirituality as the underlying predictor of religiosity and psychological flourishing, fit the data more parsimoniously than SEM B, which specified psychological flourishing as the predictor of both religiosity and spirituality. Finally, the Faith Maturity Scale and Religiosity Index demonstrated incremental validity over the Five-Factor Model of Personality in explaining significant additional variance in salient criteria of human functioning. Implications and limitations were discussed regarding the generalizability of spirituality and religiosity across different religious and psychological cultures.