Spirituality: Opportunities and Challenges of Conceptualization and Measurement

Context and relevance. Many contemporary questionnaires for measuring spirituality are characterized by a problem of scale contamination, where indicators pertaining to other constructs—primarily psychological well-being—are conflated with those of spirituality itself. This issue calls into question the validity of research findings that purport to demonstrate its positive influence on an individual's psychological status. The issue mentioned has to do not so much with the shortcomings of measurement procedures, but with the ways of conceptualizing spirituality. Objective. Article analyzes key approaches to define and operationalize spirituality. Analysis results. It is found out that the problem of contamination is typical for scales based on the humanistic models of spirituality as a broader phenomenon than religiosity. Conceptualizing spirituality as religiosity and developing scales based on the synthetic concept spirituality/religiosity is a possible way to resolve the problem. However, such a solution is not satisfactory because of its inconsistency with the cultural tendency to differentiate spirituality and religiosity both in theory and in everyday life. The article examines approaches that define spirituality in such a way as not to replace it with well-being, mental health, morality, etc., and at the same time not to reduce it to religiosity. In this regard, special attention is paid to R. Piedmont's approach to defining and measuring spirituality. His concepts of spiritual transcendence and numinous motivation and the methods based on them are analyzed. Conclusions. The article concludes that existential-humanistic approaches to conceptualize spirituality are productive, but only if they manage to identify the «core» of spirituality, which is not replaced with the value and meaning domaine of personality.