Children’s Spirituality Measure

Abstract

The Children’s Spirituality Measure (CSM) is a psychological scale developed by Moore and colleagues (2014, revised 2016) designed to assess key aspects of spirituality as understood and experienced by children. The instrument was created to address the need for a psychometrically sound measure capable of capturing diverse spiritual experiences in middle childhood. It focuses primarily on the child’s relationship with God (or a higher power) and their understanding of transcendent concepts. The CSM is structured around three core dimensions: Comfort, Omnipresence, and Duality, which reflect how children seek solace, perceive God’s presence, and conceptualize the non-physical aspects of life (soul/spirit).

The scale employs a 5-point Likert response format, allowing for nuanced measurement of the intensity of agreement or disagreement with spiritual statements, making it suitable for research in child development and religious psychology.

Keywords

Children’s Spirituality Measure, CSM, spirituality, religion, child development, psychological assessment, Comfort, Omnipresence, Duality, psychometrics.

Authors

Kelsey Moore, Victoria Talwar, Sandra Bosacki, Carlos Gomez-Garibello.

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Purpose

The primary purpose of the Children’s Spirituality Measure (CSM) is to provide researchers and practitioners with a reliable and valid instrument for quantifying the dimensions of spirituality in children. Prior to the CSM’s development, existing measures often conflated religious practice with intrinsic spiritual belief or were designed for adult populations, limiting their applicability and validity among younger subjects.

The scale aims to differentiate specific facets of spiritual understanding, such as the perceived support derived from a relationship with God (Comfort) versus abstract concepts like God’s ubiquity (Omnipresence) and the existence of a non-physical self (Duality). This nuanced approach facilitates detailed studies into how spiritual beliefs influence children’s coping mechanisms, mental health, and overall psychological well-being.

Construct

The CSM measures the construct of children’s spirituality, which is operationalized through three distinct subscales identified via factor analysis:

• Comfort: This dimension assesses the extent to which a child perceives God (or a higher power) as a source of emotional support, strength, assistance, and happiness, particularly during times of sadness, worry, or sickness. It reflects the practical, relational aspect of spirituality.
• Omnipresence: This dimension measures the child’s belief in the transcendent nature of God, including God’s capacity to be everywhere, know all thoughts and wishes, create the world, and watch over everyone. It taps into abstract theological concepts.
• Duality: This dimension captures the child’s belief in the existence of a non-physical self, often referred to as a “soul or spirit,” which exists alongside the physical body. It addresses metaphysical understanding related to human existence and transcendence.

Validity

The development of the CSM involved rigorous procedures to establish content and construct validity. Initial item generation was based on extensive qualitative data derived from Canadian children’s own descriptions of spirituality, ensuring high content validity and ecological relevance for the target population. The subsequent statistical validation, as detailed in the 2016 publication, confirmed the theoretically proposed three-factor structure (Comfort, Omnipresence, Duality) through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, supporting the scale’s construct validity.

Reliability

The internal consistency of the Children’s Spirituality Measure is robust across all identified factors, indicating high reliability. The reliability was assessed using Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients for the subscales based on the initial validation study:

• Comfort: Cronbach’s Alpha = 0.96
• Omnipresence: Cronbach’s Alpha = 0.91
• Duality: Cronbach’s Alpha = 0.81

These values demonstrate excellent to good internal consistency, suggesting that the items within each dimension reliably measure the same underlying construct of spirituality for children.

Factor Analysis

The factor structure of the CSM yielded three primary, distinct factors, confirming the theoretical model used in its development. The initial 31-item version of the scale aligns with the following factor loadings:

• Comfort Items: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 26, 28, 29, and 30. (These items generally relate to prayer, feeling strong, receiving help, and emotional well-being derived from God.)
• Omnipresence Items: 12, 17, 18 (Reversed), 19, 20, 21 (Reversed), 22 (Reversed), 23, and 24 (Reversed). (These items cover God’s knowledge, presence, and awareness.)
• Duality Items: 20, 25 (Reversed), 27 (Reversed), and 31 (Reversed). (These items focus on the existence of the soul or spirit.)

The presence of reversed items within the Omnipresence and Duality factors is essential for mitigating response bias and ensuring that the child is actively considering the statement’s content, rather than simply agreeing or disagreeing uniformly.

Instrument

Test Type: Psychological scale / Self-report measure (Likert-type).

Format: Paper-and-pencil or digital survey format using a 5-point Likert scale.

Language Available: English (developed in Canada).

Population Group: Children in middle childhood.

Age Group: Typically 8 to 12 years old (based on general use in child psychology research).

Population Details: Originally validated using a non-clinical sample of Canadian children, with subsequent research applying it to specific groups such as childhood cancer survivors.

Test Methodology: Respondents rate the extent to which they agree or disagree with each statement using the following options: Strongly Agree, Agree, I do not Agree or Disagree, Disagree, and Strongly Disagree.

Keywords

Psychological measurement, religious development, well-being, coping, childhood, spiritual assessment, Cronbach’s Alpha, factor analysis, child development.

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Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: Not provided in source materials.

Affiliation Email addresses: Not provided in source materials.

Correspondence Address: Not provided in source materials (Primary affiliation is McGill University, Montreal).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Test Year: Initial version 2014; Revised and published version 2016.

Permissions & Fee: Specific licensing information is not provided, but the original research is academically published and the scale items are available in the public domain via the linked journal article (Religions, 2016). The original PDF can be downloaded here: http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/7/8/95/pdf.

Reference’s

• Moore, K., Talwar, V., & Bosacki, S. (2012). Canadian children’s perceptions of spirituality: Diverse voices. International Journal of Children’s Spirituality, 17, 217-234.
• Moore, K., Talwar, V., Bosacki, S. (2014, May). Children’s spiritual diversity: An initial exploration of children’s understanding of spirituality. Poster presented at Development 2013, Ottawa, ON. Abstract retrieved from http://www.devpsych.ca/2014/index.php/ocs/dev/sched Conf/program
• Moore, Kelsey. (2015). The Development of a Children’s Spirituality Measure and The Exploration of the Role of Spirituality in the Lives of Childhood Cancer Survivors and a Healthy Comparison Group. McGill University, Montreal. PhD thesis. A copy of the thesis is available here: http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/webclient/StreamGate?folder_id=0&dvs=1484382476029cr‎eate642
• Moore, Kelsey., Gomez-Garibello, Carlos., Bosacki, Sandra and Talwar, Victoria. (2016). Children’s Spiritual Lives: The Development of a Children’s Spirituality Measure. Religions, 7(8), 95: 1-11.

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Items of the Children’s Spirituality Measure

IMPORTANT: The following scale items must be preserved in their original language and must not be changed in any way.

The source content provides two lists of items. The first list (31 items) is explicitly mapped to the factor structure (Comfort, Omnipresence, Duality). The second, longer list (64 items) appears to be a subsequent or comprehensive version of the instrument.

Initial Item Set (31 items) with Factor Mapping:

1. I pray to God or talk to God when I feel sad
2. There is no point in asking God for help because you have to do things by yourself
3. I ask God for help
4. People have to make themselves happy without God in their life
5. God helps me by making me feel strong
6. I can solve my own problems without God’s help
7. I pray to God or talk to God when I feel sad or worried about something
8. I have my own thoughts and ideas without God’s help
9. I pray to God or talk to God because I want to thank God for all of the good things in my life
10. God listens to my thoughts and wishes
11. God can make people feel better
12. God always knows how I feel‚ even without talking
13. God keeps people company when they feel sad and lonely
14. When I think about God‚ I feel happy
15. I make wishes to God and the wishes come true
16. I pray to God or talk to God when someone is sick or when someone dies
17. God is everywhere in the world and watches over everybody
18. God will never know what I am thinking to myself*
19. I think God listens to everyone
20. Every person has a body and something inside them‚ like a soul or spirit
21. There are too many in the world for God to know all of them*
22. There are too many people in the world for God to listen to*
23. God created all the people in the world and knows all of them
24. It is impossible for God to watch over everybody*
25. People do not have a soul or a spirit*
26. When I want to feel better‚ I talk or pray to God
27. I think that people have something like a soul or a spirit‚ that lives inside them*
28. God helps me by giving me advice
29. God helps me by making me think of new ideas
30. When I pray to God or talk to God I feel better about things
31. Everyone has a body‚ but having a soul or a spirit is fake*

* Reversed item

Comprehensive Item Set (64 items):

1. When I think about God I feel happy
2. Praying to God makes me feel worse when I am sad
3. I ask God for help
4. God’s miracles are fake
5. God created the world
6. People are without spirit
7. God listen to my thoughts and wishes
8. I think boys like God more
9. When I pray to God or talk to God‚ I feel better about things
10. People still feel alone and scared even if they talk or pray to God
11. God helps me with my problems by giving me advice
12. The idea that God can make wishes come true is wrong
13. God is everywhere in the world and watches over everybody
14. Some people think God lives with spirits of dead people‚ I think God lives alone
15. God always knows what I feel even without talking
16. I think it is bad that different people pray to different Gods
17. Whenever I want to feel better‚ I talk or pray to God
18. If someone is sick‚ I would talk to my family about it instead of talking to God
19. God helps me by making me think of new ideas
20. Praying to God about wishes is a waste of time
21. God created all the people in the world and knows all of them
22. It is impossible to live with God after you die
23. I think that God listens to everyone
24. I am sad that some people do not believe in God
25. People have to make themselves happy without God
26. I would rather talk to my family and friends about being sad instead of talking to God
27. God helps me by making me feel strong
28. Some people thank God for things‚ but I would never do that
29. God created the world and everything in it
30. Everyone has a body‚ but spirits are fake
31. God listens all the time
32. I feel bad when people make jokes about God
33. I feel unhappy when I think about God
34. I pray to God or talk to God when I feel sad or worried about something
35. There is no point in asking God for help because you have to do things by yourself
36. God can do miracles—God can cure people and do things that are not humanly possible
37. The world was created by accident
38. I think that people have a soul or a spirit that lives inside them
39. God will never know my thoughts and wishes
40. I think girls like God more
41. Talking to God about my problems makes me feel worse
42. God keeps people company when they feel sad and lonely
43. I can solve problems without God helping me
44. I make wishes to God and the wishes come true
45. It is impossible for God to watch over everybody
46. When people die‚ their soul or spirit stays alive and lives with God
47. God will never know what I am thinking to myself
48. It is okay that people in different countries pray to different Gods
49. Talking or praying to God makes me feel worse about things
50. I pray to God or talk to God when someone is sick or when someone dies
51. I have my own thoughts and ideas without God’s help
52. A reason I pray or talk to God is to wish for things
53. There are too many people in the world for God to know all of them
54. I think spirits live with God
55. There are too many people in the world for God to listen to
56. I feel okay knowing that some people do not believe in God
57. God can make people feel better
58. I pray to God or talk to God when I feel sad
59. I would never ask God to help me feel strong
60. I pray to God or talk to God because I want to thank him for all of the good things in my life
61. People created the world and everything in it
62. Everyone has a body and a spirit
63. God only listens to people when God feels like it
64. Some people make jokes about God and that’s okay