Spirituality is an important theme in health research, since a spiritual orientation can help people to cope with the consequences of a serious disease. Knowledge on the role of spirituality is, however, limited, as most research is based on measures of religiosity rather than spirituality. A questionnaire that transcends specific beliefs is a prerequisite for quantifying the importance of spirituality among people who adhere to a religion or none at all. In this review, we discuss ten questionnaires that address spirituality as a universal human experience. Questionnaires are evaluated with regard to psychometric properties, item formulation and confusion with well-being and distress. Although none of the questionnaires fulfilled all the criteria, the multidimensional Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire is promising.

Objective: This study evaluated the psychological effects of a pre-surgical stress management training (SMT) in cancer patients.Methods: Stress management training comprised four sessions in total: on 5 days and 1 day pre-surgery and on 2 days and 1 month post-surgery. Patients also received audio CDs with relaxation and coping skills exercises. Patients were randomly assigned to the SMT (N = 34) or a regular care condition (N = 36). Depression, anxiety, quality of life, perception of control, fatigue, pain, sleep problems, and surgery-related somatic symptoms were measured at Day 6 and Day 1 pre-surgery, and Day 2, 5, 30 and 90 post-surgery.Results: Depression and fatigue decreased in the intervention group and increased in the control group, leading to significant group differences at Day 2 (fatigue) and Day 5 post-surgery (fatigue and depression). It also appeared that surgery-related symptoms had increased more in the control group 3 months post-surgery than in the SMT group. No intervention effects were observed for anxiety, pain, and sleep problems.Conclusion: The use of a short psychological intervention is effective in reducing depression and fatigue in the post-surgical period, although the effects are of short duration.

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Spirituality may help people to maintain a high level of well-being despite adversity, but several studies that claim to support this statement have used spirituality scales and outcome measures that have overlapping content. This practice seems to be widespread: In an exploratory survey of eight well-cited journals we found that 26 of 58 studies used a spirituality scale that contains 25% or more of well-being items to examine whether spirituality predicts well-being or distress. These spirituality questionnaires would be more appropriate for use as indicators of the domain of quality of life called spiritual well-being. We urge researchers to only use spirituality questionnaires of which less than 25% of the items refer to emotional well-beingsuch as the SWB Questionnaire or the Spiritual Attitude and Involvement List-when investigating the causal relationship between spirituality and emotional well-being.