Texas Tech University

This is a survey designed to expore the effects of divorce on spirituality. This is instrument to collect data for my doctoral dissertation entitled: Divorce and Spirituality for members of Christian churches.

As mental health practitioners, family therapists frequently deal with divorce and divorce issues and are usually well trained in this arena. When it comes to spirituality and spiritual healing however, some therapists are more comfortable dealing with it than others (Haug, 1998). This could be in part because there is little to no training available in mainstream family therapy training in dealing with spiritual issues (Haug, 1998). Regardless of a practitioner's level of training, the issues exist and we as practitioners may miss the opportunity for helping a client more fully if we do not address them. In fact, attending to the presenting problem of divorce and divorce issues without understanding the client's religious and spiritual paradigms can lead to difficulty and limited progress in treatment. Therefore, understanding the relationship between divorce and spirituality is vital to helping clients succeed.

The current study involves LDS and Protestant scores on several measures, namely, the Spiritual Well-Being Scale (SWBS), the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, and Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). Each scale generates a continuous variable that will be compared between groups, namely Protestant and LDS. Since this research has not been done in this manner, this study is meant to explore issues that are similar and different for the identified groups. These similarities and differences will be measured by means, frequencies, and some multivariate statistics.