Positive Psychology’s Character Strengths in Addiction-Spirituality Research: A Qualitative Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in the scientific study of the association between spirituality and recovery from addiction. While most of these studies have provided evidence for a possible relationship, others have explored the underlying mechanisms and meditators in the relationship. However, generally, many studies and reviews have not approached the issue within a specific theoretical framework of mainstream psychology. In an attempt to fill this gap, the review being reported here undertook a Qualitative Systematic Literature Review (QSLR) of addiction-spirituality literature. QSLR is an orderly manner of searching for academic literature, selecting relevant literature following a set of inclusion/exclusion criteria, qualitatively analysing the selected literature, and reporting the findings in such a way as to generate a set of hypotheses. QSLR focusses on literary data, rather than on numerical data as the tradition Systematic Literature Review and Meta-analysis do. Working within the framework of positive psychology, the present review attempted to identify the character strengths relevant to addiction and recovery by carrying out a QSLR on 53 selected peer-reviewed articles. Among the 24 character strengths, the following emerged as salient: wisdom, integrity, vitality, humility, forgiveness, kindness, love, hope and spirituality. On this basis, a hypothetical conclusion is suggested.

Recommendations for male-friendly individual counseling with men: A qualitative systematic literature review for the period 1995–2016.

“…Qualitative systematic literature reviews focus attention on the discussion and recommendations rather than quantitative results or procedures (Selvam & Sahaya, 2015). The qualitative techniques used were thematic analysis using Braun and Clarke's (2006) six phases.…”

The values in action character strengths model in addiction recovery: a case study

“…In March 2022, the time of authoring this work, a search of the scholarly databases Google Scholar and ProQuest using the search term “Character Strengths” AND “Addiction Recovery” did not return any results looking at character strengths as a broad-spectrum strategy for strengthening addiction recovery. The results returned from this search showed existing work was limited, having focused on the specific application of a strength, for example, the use of gratitude as a means to build reserves of recovery capital to safeguard long-term recovery (White, 2008; Chen, 2017) or in how character strengths relate to a particular area of interest such as spirituality (Selvam, 2015). The present study looks at how the VIA model of character strengths can be applied as a general resource to support those in addiction recovery, with the aim of suggesting a way to appreciate the positive outcomes seen in other areas of research (Niemiec, 2019; Schutte and Malouff, 2019) to addiction recovery.…”

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