Daily Spirituality 1 A Multilevel Analysis of Spirituality and Personality in Daily Life

Most existing research and theory have concerned spirituality as a trait, an individual difference that is presumed to be relatively stable across time and situations. The present study examined the state variability of spirituality: How does spirituality vary within an individual? Every day for two weeks, 127 participants provided measures of the strength of their spiritual beliefs and other measures of psychological states including, self-esteem, depressive thinking, and self-focused thinking, and they described the events that occurred each day. Multilevel random coefficient modeling analyses found that at the within-person level, spirituality was positively related to daily positive events and was positively related to daily reflection about the self, i.e., adaptive self-focused attention. Participants also provided dispositional (trait) measures of the same constructs, and trait spirituality was positively related to agreeableness, conscientiousness, and reflection, and was negatively related to rumination. Overall, the results suggested that it is useful to distinguish state and trait spirituality and that at both level of analysis, spirituality is associated with beneficial intraand interpersonal characteristics. Daily Spirituality 3 A Multilevel Analysis of Spirituality and Personality in Daily Life Embedding the spiritual and religious aspects of people’s lives within the larger framework of personality theory and the study of individual differences per se should improve our understanding of spirituality and religiosity. The present study was designed to do this by examining the relationships between spirituality and various individual differences reflecting broad theories of personality (i.e., the Five Factor Model), individual differences in self focused thinking and self-evaluation (e.g., self-esteem), and psychological adjustment (e.g., depression). Although previous research has examined some of these relationships at the between person level (i.e., relationships among traits), to my knowledge, no previous study has examined within-person relationships among these constructs. For example, are daily changes in thoughts and feelings of depression related to daily changes in spirituality? Spirituality has been defined in various ways, including “that vast realm of human potential dealing with ultimate purposes, with higher entities, with God, with love, with compassion, with purpose” (Tart, 1975). Although they are related constructs, it is important to distinguish spirituality from religiosity. Generally speaking, religiosity refers to the endorsement of organized religion (attending a worship service, observing a particular religious doctrine or tradition, etc.), whereas spirituality is a broader term that focuses on relationship between individuals and some sort of transcendent force. Furthermore, spirituality may consist of heterogeneous practices not necessarily connected to organized religious institutions but to personal beliefs and experiences of the sacred (Turner, Lukoff, Barnhouse, & Lu, 1995). Therefore, it is possible to be spiritual while not being religious, although the two may be related. See Zinnbauer and Pargament (2005) for a discussion of the evolving nature of the constructs of spirituality and religiosity and the implications of this evolution for studying these topics. The present study concerned daily changes in spirituality and is part of series of studies examining within-person variability in psychological states (e.g., Nezlek, 2005). The primary assumption underlying this study was that spirituality has both a trait and state component. That is, although people can be classified as being spiritual or not (or spiritual to varying degrees), a Daily Spirituality 4 trait component, it is also likely that people vary across time or situations in how spiritual they are, a state component. Although there is no consensus regarding the period of time over which a state is defined, for present purposes, changes in spirituality were examined across days because the day is a psychologically meaningful unit of time. In addition to examining state variability in spirituality, the present study had a broader goal of integrating the study of spirituality more closely with the study of personality and other individual differences. This was done by collecting measures representing a range of psychological constructs. Although as discussed by Nezlek (2005), there is no agreed-upon collection of psychological characteristics defining the universe of daily psychological states, there are some broad categories that can be used. For present purposes, spirituality was examined in combination with measures of basic personality (the Five Factor Model, FFM), psychological well-being (e.g., depression), and self-focused attention (self-consciousness). More detailed explanations for the inclusion of these measures and for the hypotheses that guided the study are provided below. The design of the study was similar to the design used in a growing body of research that is sometimes referred to as “intensive repeated measures” research. In the present study, participants provided data once a day for two weeks. Each day they provided a measure of how spiritual they felt that day, they described the events they had experienced that day, and they provided other state level measures. In addition, they provided trait level measures of the constructs that were measured on a daily basis. These data provided the opportunity to examine within-person relationships between spirituality and external conditions (i.e., daily events) and between spirituality and other psychological states (e.g., self-esteem). Moreover, between-person differences in such within-person relationships could be examined. For example, does the daily spirituality of some people fluctuate more in response to external events than the daily spirituality of others? Finally, these data allowed comparisons of withinand between-person relationships between spirituality and other constructs. Such a distinction is critical because relationships between the same Daily Spirituality 5 constructs at different levels of analysis are mathematically independent (e.g., Nezlek, 2001) and may represent different psychological processes (e.g., Tennen, Affleck, & Armeli, 2005). Although there may not be a consensus regarding a “best” model for personality, there is broad agreement that what has become known as the Five Factor Model (FFM) is a useful conceptual framework for studying personality. The FFM provides a template that can be used to understand a construct more fully. In the present study, the five factors comprising the FFM were measured at both the trait and state levels. This provided the opportunity to examine relationships between spirituality and the FFM at both the withinand between-person levels. There is little research on state variability in the FFM factors, and so my expectations were based primarily on trait level research. Given the definitions of the constructs comprising the FFM, openness was the construct that I thought would be related most closely to spirituality at both the state and trait levels. This hypothesis was based on the assumption that openness, which is defined in terms of imaginativeness and creativity, intellectual and aesthetic interests, and broad-mindedness and unconventionality, overlaps conceptually with spirituality. For example, Tart’s (1975) definition of spirituality emphasizes broad ideas and the meaning of life. Individuals who are more open intellectually would seem to be people who are more interested in such matters. In contrast, individuals who are less concerned with issues such as the meaning of life would seem to be less interested in intellectual pursuits and examining new ideas. Moreover, as summarized by Piedmont (2005), various studies have found positive relationships between openness and different measures of spirituality. The other factor from the FFM that has been found to correlate (positively) with measures of religiosity and spirituality is agreeableness (e.g., Piedmont, 2005). Piedmont suggests that such a relationship is due to the fact that a compassionate attitude toward others is a component of spirituality. It should be noted however, that agreeableness tended to correlate more with measures of religiosity more than it did with measures of spirituality. In contrast, none of the conceptual definitions of the other factors seemed to be related to spirituality. For example, although some might argue that neuroticism should be negatively related to spirituality because less distressed people have a firmer base from which to consider Daily Spirituality 6 spiritual matters, it is possible that more distressed people think more about life and its meaning as they attempt to deal with their problems. Similar contradictory arguments can be made for the other factors. In light of this, I expected spirituality to be related to openness and agreeableness, and I examined relationships between spirituality and the other FFM constructs on an exploratory basis. See Piedmont (2005) for a discussion of relationships between spirituality and the FFM. The second group of constructs that was included in the study were measures of self-focused attention. Self-focused attention was chosen because to some extent, spirituality involves thinking about one’s self and one’s relationship to the world. The specific constructs that were measured were reflection and rumination and public self-consciousness. Initially, selffocused attention was conceptualized in terms of two dimensions, private and public selfconsciousness (e.g., Feningstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975). Research on private self-consciousness was somewhat contradictory however. For example, some studies found that increased private self-consciousness was associated with poorer psychological functioning, whereas other studies found that increased private sel