Teaching spiritual techniques in continuing education programmes to train older adults for community service and volunteer work contributes to self-efficacy and prosocial behaviours: A five-year follow-up study in four South Asian cities

Abstract

This article presents a five-year follow-up waitlist control design study investigating the impact of a spiritual education programme on self-efficacy and prosocial behaviours of South Asian older adults participating in adult and continuing education initiatives of volunteer work and community service. Intervention group older adults (IN2 = 321) reported higher scores on outcome measures as compared to the waitlist control group (CN2 = 303). Post-intervention outcome scores were higher for participants from Mumbai and Kathmandu, women, middle class, Hindus and Buddhists, single, highly educated, in good health, with an innate desire to volunteer, who attended more than 75% of the spiritual education programme lessons and regularly self-practiced. Self-practice was the strongest predictor of post-test outcomes. Structural equation models indicated that spiritual education programme attendance and self-practice mediated the relationship between socio-demographic moderators and outcomes. The spiritual education programme is a useful intervention and can be incorporated in adult and continuing education training programmes with some refinements for specific subgroups.

Interventions stimulating prosocial helping behavior: A systematic review

“…Follow‐up assessment was conducted in 15 of the 49 studies (Tables 1 and 2). It was usually performed a few months after the post‐test; the time interval ranged from one to 18 months, and in individual studies it was as long as four years (Bradshaw, Waasdorp, & Leaf, 2012) and five years (Pandya, 2019).…”

Implementing a Spiritual and Moral Education Program for Maths Teachers

“…The most common secular concept of understanding spirituality is perceived as a socio-cultural phenomenon (Chiang Yi-Chien, 2020;Carr, 1996;Pandya, 2020). ìThe ability to express, preserve, and create culture is a specific human attribute, which is attributed to the spiritual realm.…”

“…Therefore, one of the most important characteristics of spirituality is its value and meaningful character. In this case, spiritual education is regarded as a process of fundamental value and meaning orientation, associated with the acquisition of spiritual and moral experience and the need to create conditions for the spiritual formation and development of personality (Solovtsova, 2012;Pandya, 2020). Khugaeva (2019) highlights the dialogical nature of spirituality, which implies the possibility of comprehending both spiritual and inner world of other people and culture as a whole.…”

“…Researchers have shown a positive impact of spiritual education for caregivers (Moghaddam et al, 2016) and nurses (Chiang et al, 2020). The experience of the South Asian senior spiritual education program is described in Pandya (2020). The author does not indicate that he set Christian goals in the program (love for God and neighbor), but believes that this program had a positive impact on self-efficacy and prosocial behavior.…”

“…With the modern development of mutual relations between countries, spiritual and moral education of youth has been the subject of many scholars (Carpenter, 2020;Pandya, 2020;SardoË, 2019;Shirshov, 2020;Tokic, 2019). However, the spiritual and moral education of teachersí personalities has not been explored adequately.…”