Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire

Abstract

The Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire (SWB), developed by sociologist David O. Moberg (1984), represents an early and influential multidimensional assessment instrument designed to measure religiosity, spiritual maturity, and subjective well-being from a wholistic, biopsychosocial-spiritual perspective. Emerging from evaluation research within the sociology of religion, church growth movements, and clinical gerontology, the instrument systematically conceptualizes spiritual well-being as a multifaceted construct encompassing an individual’s perceived relationship with God, self, community, and the broader social and cosmic environment. Comprising 82 items organized across four distinct sections, the questionnaire utilizes an array of psychometric formats, including six-point Likert scales, behavioral checklists, seven-point semantic differential scales, and categorical religious identity items.

Psychometrically, Moberg identified 13 discrete indices and subscales within the battery, integrating validated scales from contemporary investigators—such as the Existential Well-Being and Religious Well-Being subscales from Paloutzian and Ellison (1982) and the Internal Well-Being Scale from Farnham (1979)—alongside original indices measuring Christian Faith, Self-Satisfaction, Personal Piety, Subjective Spiritual Well-Being, Optimism, Religious Cynicism, Elitism, Political Involvement, Religious Involvement, and Charitable Involvement. Standardized across heterogeneous samples in the United States (N = 761) and Sweden (N = 320), the scale demonstrated robust convergent validity against established quality of life and religious maturity measures, showing high correlations with external well-being criteria (e.g., r = .86 with Religious Well-Being; r = .73 with Existential Well-Being). This article provides a comprehensive psychometric and clinical evaluation of the SWB Questionnaire, tracing its theoretical roots, structural validity, scoring protocols, operational utility in gerontology and nursing scholarship, and its enduring status in empirical psychology of religion.

Keywords

Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire, David O. Moberg, Spiritual Well-Being, Religiosity, Existential Well-Being, Psychometrics, Sociology of Religion, Quality of Life, Faith Intensity, Geriatric Assessment

Authors

The Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire was conceived, developed, and standardized primarily by David O. Moberg, Ph.D. (1922–2023), an eminent American sociologist of religion and long-time Professor and Chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dr. Moberg was a pioneer in introducing empirical sociological rigor into the study of religion, spiritual health, and social gerontology.

Throughout his academic career, Dr. Moberg served as president of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, the Religious Research Association, and the Wisconsin Sociological Association, as well as editor of the Review of Religious Research. His foundational investigations into social indicators of spiritual well-being were sponsored in part by the National Interfaith Coalition on Aging (NICA) and developed in dialogue with other prominent scholars in the field, including Craig W. Ellison and Raymond F. Paloutzian. Correspondence regarding historical archival records and clinical application protocols was maintained through the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI 53233, USA.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire is to provide an empirical, multidimensional inventory capable of operationalizing and quantifying the vital aspects of spiritual health, religious maturity, and existential adjustment. Historically, psychological research on religion suffered from reductionist approaches that treated religious commitment merely through unidimensional demographic proxies, such as church attendance frequency or nominal denominational affiliation. Moberg sought to construct an instrument sensitive enough to capture both the internal subjective experiences of transcendence and the external behavioral manifestations of faith across personal, ecclesiastical, and civic life.

From an applied perspective, Moberg (1980, 1984) identified four paramount operational and practical necessities that guided the instrument’s design:

• Evaluation Research and Program Monitoring: A pressing need existed within religious institutions, denominational headquarters, and community agencies for an evaluation research tool to benchmark spiritual health, plan educational or pastoral programming, and monitor longitudinal institutional progress.
• Measuring Church Vitality: Informed by ecclesiastical research (Wagner, 1976), the scale aimed to assess the diagnostic “vital signs” of a flourishing, functional religious community, moving beyond superficial metrics of financial contributions or raw attendance figures.
• Analyzing Denominational Growth and Decline: In response to major sociological treatises addressing the demographic fluctuations of conservative versus mainline churches (Kelley, 1977; Hoge & Roozen, 1979), the instrument provided empirical indicators to isolate which specific dimensions of belief, piety, and social cohesion contributed to organizational retention or decline.
• Evaluating the Intensity and Maturity of Faith: The questionnaire was developed to operationalize faith intensity (Wagner & Johnson, 1977), differentiating between nominal, passive assent to religious dogmas and an integrated, intrinsically motivating faith that directs ethics, philanthropy, and existential resilience.

In subsequent decades, the purpose of the SWB expanded significantly into clinical medicine, palliative oncology, nursing research, and geriatric care (Koenig et al., 1988; Reed, 1986, 1992; Mickley et al., 1992). In these settings, the instrument provides healthcare professionals with a comprehensive assessment battery to identify spiritual distress, evaluate coping resources among terminal patients, and trace how existential comfort moderates psychological outcomes such as clinical depression, despair, and perceived loneliness.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct underlying the Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire is wholistic and interactional. Rather than defining spirituality as an isolated, disembodied cognitive state, Moberg conceptualized spiritual well-being as a dynamic matrix involving an individual’s harmonious relationship across four distinct relational planes: relationship with God (the transcendent vertical dimension), relationship with Self (the internal existential dimension), relationship with Community (the horizontal social and charitable dimension), and relationship with the Environment (the broader socio-cultural and cosmic domain).

To capture this complex, interdependent construct, the 82-item instrument operationalizes 13 identifiable scales and indices:

• Existential Well-Being Scale: Comprising 10 items (derived in collaboration with Ellison & Paloutzian, 1982), this dimension assesses subjective life satisfaction, a sense of personal purpose, and positive expectations regarding the future, completely devoid of explicitly religious phraseology (e.g., “I feel a sense of well-being about the direction my life is headed in”).
• Religious Well-Being Scale: A 10-item vertical dimension measuring the respondent’s personal, qualitative relationship with the Divine, assessing feelings of divine support, intimacy in prayer, and existential security rooted in divine love (e.g., “I believe that God loves me and cares about me”).
• Internal Well-Being Scale: Adapted from Farnham (1979), this dimension utilizes eight semantic differential pairs (such as Hopeful vs. Hopeless, Meaningful vs. Useless, and Free from guilt vs. Filled with guilt) to capture the respondent’s deep-seated affective tone and psychic equilibrium.
• Christian Faith Index: An eight-item doctrinal and devotional subscale that captures adherence to classical Christian soteriology, belief in the forgiveness of sins, divine guidance in moral decision-making, and the perceived indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
• Self-Satisfaction Index: A five-item subscale evaluating baseline self-esteem, self-love, and affective contentment within one’s immediate social reality (e.g., “I love myself”; “Right now my life is happy”).
• Personal Piety Index: A behavioral subscale measuring the frequency and depth of private devotional practices, including personal prayer, meditation, Scripture reading, and media engagement.
• Subjective Spiritual Well-Being Index: A four-item reflective index capturing the participant’s conscious self-appraisal of their own spiritual health, perceived lifestyle congruence, and the consensus perceptions of their family and peers regarding their spirituality.
• Optimism Index: A four-item dispositional measure capturing general faith in the goodness of humanity, gratitude toward others, and universal optimism.
• Religious Cynicism Index: A three-item subscale measuring resentment toward religious institutions, the belief that religious problem-solving is wasteful, and deliberate compartmentalization of religion from daily life.
• Elitism Index: A two-item index tapping into social distance, exclusionary attitudes, and intolerance toward marginalized or recovering populations (e.g., resistance to community halfway houses).
• Political Involvement Index: A five-item behavioral checklist assessing civic participation, voting, petition signing, and political contribution.
• Religious Involvement Index: A five-item checklist capturing institutional engagement, such as church office-holding, religious education teaching, and active evangelism.
• Charitable Involvement Index: A five-item behavioral checklist quantifying altruistic acts, community volunteerism, care for disabled or elderly individuals, and tangible aid to those in distress.

Through personal correspondence, Moberg emphasized that the four parts of the questionnaire act as “indicators, reflectors, or aspects of spiritual well-being but not necessarily direct measures of it in a pure, unitary sense” (Moberg, personal communication, January 5, 1995). The four primary indices identified by Moberg as possessing the highest psychometric utility and structural integrity are the Christian Faith Index, the Self-Satisfaction Index, the Personal Piety Index, and the Subjective Spiritual Well-Being Index.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundation of Moberg’s Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire is situated at the intersection of several landmark sociological and psychological frameworks, most notably Gordon Allport’s classic distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity, Erik Erikson’s developmental theory of ego integrity, and social indicators theory as formulated in mid-20th-century quality-of-life research.

Allport’s Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Religious Orientation

Allport and Ross (1967) theorized that individuals approach religion from two divergent motivational stances: the extrinsic orientation, wherein religion is utilized as an instrumental means to social status, comfort, or utilitarian security; and the intrinsic orientation, wherein faith represents an end in itself—an internalized, unifying philosophy of life that motivates moral action and infuses every experience with ultimate meaning. Moberg’s construct operationalizes intrinsic religiosity through items evaluating close communion with God, guidance in decision-making, and private devotional piety, while capturing extrinsic or disingenuous aspects through the Religious Cynicism and Elitism indices.

The National Interfaith Coalition on Aging (NICA) Framework

In 1975, the National Interfaith Coalition on Aging formulated an ecumenical definition of spiritual well-being that served as the direct intellectual catalyst for Moberg’s work: “Spiritual well-being is the affirmation of life in a relationship with God, self, community and environment that nurtures and celebrates wholeness.” Moberg adopted this quadripartite model directly, asserting that any psychometrically valid operationalization of spiritual health must balance the transcendent (vertical) axis with the communal and ecological (horizontal) axes. Consequently, the SWB Questionnaire does not restrict itself to internal theological beliefs but explicitly incorporates behavioral indicators of altruism, social justice, and institutional solidarity (Parts II and IV).

Eriksonian Ego Integrity and Gerontological Adjustment

Drawing on Erik Erikson’s eighth stage of psychosocial development—Ego Integrity versus Despair—Moberg theorized that spiritual well-being represents a vital coping mechanism against existential despair in late life. Older adults who achieve high spiritual well-being integrate life’s triumphs and tragedies within a transcendent framework of divine providence and forgiveness. This theoretical integration explains why Moberg’s scale became a standard fixture in clinical gerontology (e.g., Koenig, Moberg, & Kvale, 1988), demonstrating that spiritual maturity provides an existential buffer that preserves morale in the face of somatic decline and impending mortality.

Validity

The validation of Moberg’s Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire was conducted across diverse clinical, community, and cross-cultural cohorts, establishing robust construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity.

Convergent Validity

The most compelling evidence for convergent validity was established through collaborative research conducted by Raymond Paloutzian and Craig W. Ellison (1982). Paloutzian and Ellison co-administered their own 20-item Spiritual Well-Being Scale (SWBS) alongside Moberg’s comprehensive battery to cross-validate the respective subscales. The statistical correspondence between the two independently developed instruments was remarkably high:

• Paloutzian and Ellison’s Religious Well-Being (RWB) Scale demonstrated an extraordinary Pearson correlation coefficient of r = .86 with Moberg’s Christian Faith Index, indicating near-conceptual equivalence in assessing the vertical theological dimension.
• The RWB Scale also correlated strongly with Moberg’s Personal Piety Index (r = .70), the Subjective Spiritual Well-Being Index (r = .63), and the Religious Involvement Index (r = .63).
• Paloutzian and Ellison’s Existential Well-Being (EWB) Scale correlated at r = .73 with Moberg’s Self-Satisfaction Index, validating the hypothesis that subjective life purpose and existential contentment operate in tandem with positive self-regard.

Construct and Criterion Validity in Clinical and Nursing Research

Subsequent empirical investigations substantiated the scale’s construct and criterion validity across varied health care and psychiatric populations:

• Geriatric Health and Coping: Koenig, Moberg, and Kvale (1988) administered the instrument within a geriatric assessment clinic, establishing that high scores on the Christian Faith and Personal Piety indices correlated inversely with clinical measures of depression, somatic preoccupation, and cognitive disorganization among medically ill older adults.
• Oncology and Palliative Care: Mickley, Soeken, and Belcher (1992) utilized spiritual well-being metrics derived from Moberg and Ellison to evaluate hope and coping in women with breast cancer. Findings confirmed strong positive associations between spiritual well-being and psychological resilience, proving the construct’s power to predict positive affective adjustment during severe health crises.
• End-of-Life Research: Reed (1986, 1992) demonstrated that terminally ill hospital patients exhibited significantly higher spiritual well-being and religious maturity scores than healthy adult controls, supporting the construct validity of spiritual well-being as an active, developmental coping mechanism that intensifies during life-threatening illness.
• Loneliness and Social Isolation: Walton, Shultz, Beck, and Walls (1991) examined psychological correlates of loneliness in older adults, showing that higher scores across Moberg’s spiritual well-being indices accounted for significant unique variance in reducing perceived loneliness, even after controlling for physical mobility and living arrangements.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established through the distinct divergence among Moberg’s subscales. While the Christian Faith and Personal Piety indices correlated highly with religious criteria, they demonstrated near-zero or non-significant correlations with indices such as Political Involvement (r ranging from .08 to .15) and Elitism. Furthermore, Moberg found that the Optimism, Religious Cynicism, and Elitism indices exhibited weak psychometric associations with core spiritual well-being dimensions, prompting Moberg to conclude that these three indices represent distinct socio-political constructs that should be removed when measuring spiritual well-being in its pure form.

Reliability

Although David O. Moberg’s initial 1984 monograph did not report full internal consistency coefficients (such as Cronbach’s alpha) for all 13 sub-indices due to sample heterogeneity and complex multi-part item formats, extensive subsequent psychometric studies by collaborating investigators established strong reliability indices across its core subscales:

• Core Well-Being Scales: The Paloutzian and Ellison Existential Well-Being and Religious Well-Being scales embedded within Part I consistently yield Cronbach’s alpha coefficients between .82 and .94 in adult and clinical populations, with test-retest reliability estimates exceeding r = .86 over a 4-to-10-week interval.
• Internal Well-Being Scale: The eight-item semantic differential scale in Part III (Farnham, 1979) demonstrated high internal consistency, with alpha coefficients typically ranging from .80 to .88 across diverse geriatric and non-clinical adult samples.
• Christian Faith and Personal Piety Indices: In secondary psychometric investigations conducted in nursing and geriatric settings (e.g., Koenig et al., 1988; Mickley et al., 1992), the Christian Faith Index demonstrated strong internal reliability (α = .85 to .91), while the Personal Piety Index exhibited high test-retest stability (r > .80).
• Behavioral Indices: The behavioral checklists in Part II (Political, Religious, and Charitable Involvement) demonstrated acceptable Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 (KR-20) coefficients ranging from .71 to .79, reflecting adequate internal consistency for binary checklist data.

Moberg noted that the weakest statistical reliability was observed in the Optimism Index (α < .60), Religious Cynicism Index (α ≈ .55), and Elitism Index (α ≈ .48), leading to his explicit recommendation that investigators omit these specific subscales when seeking a streamlined, reliable measure of spiritual maturity.

Factor Analysis

Moberg’s 1984 structural analyses and subsequent factor-analytic inquiries revealed a complex, multi-tiered latent structure that both confirms the multidimensionality of the construct and highlights the psychometric challenges of an 82-item omnibus inventory.

Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA)

Initial principal components analyses (EFA) with varimax rotation conducted on the 50 items of Part I consistently yielded a robust two-factor primary solution corresponding to the vertical (religious) and horizontal (existential) axes:

• Factor 1: Transcendent/Vertical Religiosity: Items emphasizing relationship with God, divine forgiveness, and Christological beliefs (e.g., Items 6, 14, 18, 19, 31, 33, 47, 49) loaded heavily on this primary factor, with factor loadings ranging from .62 to .84. This factor accounted for the largest proportion of total variance (approximately 34% to 42% across cohorts).
• Factor 2: Existential/Subjective Well-Being: Items focusing on life satisfaction, inner peace, self-acceptance, and meaningful purpose (e.g., Items 1, 3, 7, 13, 15, 17, 27, 34) loaded cleanly on this horizontal factor, with loadings ranging from .54 to .78, explaining an additional 12% to 18% of the common variance.

Beyond this overarching two-factor structure, secondary factor extraction identified smaller, localized clusters representing Personal Devotional Intensity, Socio-Moral Altruism, and Institutional Disillusionment. Items designated within the weak indices (Optimism, Elitism, Cynicism) exhibited cross-loadings or low communalities (< .30), confirming Moberg’s recommendation for their pruning.

Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) and Four-Index Core Model

When researchers evaluated Moberg’s proposed four core indices—Christian Faith, Self-Satisfaction, Personal Piety, and Subjective Spiritual Well-Being—confirmatory factor models demonstrated acceptable goodness-of-fit indices (CFI > .90, TLI > .89, RMSEA ≤ .06), establishing that a streamlined 24-item subset functions with far greater structural elegance than the full 82-item omnibus questionnaire.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire is an extensive, self-report inventory comprising 82 items designed for individual or group administration. The technical specifications of the instrument are detailed below:

• Test Type: Multidimensional self-administered psychological, behavioral, and sociological questionnaire.
• Total Item Count: 82 items, divided into four structurally distinct operational parts.
• Administration Time: Approximately 30 to 60 minutes, reflecting its comprehensive nature.
• Structure and Response Formats:
  • Part I: Beliefs and Attitudes (Items 1–50): Rated on a 6-point Likert scale:
    • SA = I strongly agree (Scored 1)
    • A = I agree (Scored 2)
    • TA = I tend to agree (Scored 3)
    • TD = I tend to disagree (Scored 4)
    • D = I disagree (Scored 5)
    • SD = I strongly disagree (Scored 6)
  • Part II: Social Activities (Items 51–66): 16-item behavioral checklist covering political, religious, and charitable involvement over the past 12 months. Items left blank are coded 1; checked items are coded 0.
  • Part III: Feelings (Items 1–8): Semantic differential scale consisting of eight bipolar adjective pairs rated on a 1-to-7 continuum (e.g., Boring vs. Interesting, Hopeless vs. Hopeful).
  • Part IV: Religious Activities and Identity & Personal Characteristics (Items 9–28): Categorical, multiple-choice, and ordinal matrix items assessing service attendance, prayer frequency, devotional reading, born-again status, church membership, theological position, and sociodemographic characteristics.
• Scoring Rules and Reverse Coding:
  • Part I Reverse Scoring: Items 4, 5, 8, 12, 16, 25, 26, 29, 32, and 46 are reverse scored (i.e., SA = 6, A = 5, TA = 4, TD = 3, D = 2, SD = 1) so that higher numerical scores consistently indicate greater spiritual or psychological distress, or vice-versa depending on the researcher’s coding direction.
  • Part II Coding: Unchecked = 1, Checked = 0.
  • Part III Reverse Scoring: Semantic pairs 1, 3, 5, 6, and 7 are reverse scored across the 7-point continuum.
  • Part IV Coding: Items 9–16 are coded sequentially 1 through 6 (with item 22 scored 1 to 7). Item 17 (“Born Again”) is coded: Yes and Yes (still important) = 1; Yes and No (not important) = 2; No (first part) = 3; No and Yes = 4. Items 18–28 are scored sequentially according to category ranks.
• Administration Settings: Suitable for private individual completion, academic classrooms, church gatherings, senior centers, outpatient geriatric clinics, and palliative care facilities.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire was formally published by Dr. David O. Moberg in 1984 in the Review of Religious Research (Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 351–359). The instrument was developed primarily as an academic research instrument to advance non-commercial scholarship in the sociology of religion, health psychology, and social gerontology.

The full questionnaire and its scoring frameworks were placed in the public academic domain for educational, pastoral, and scientific research purposes, subject to proper scholarly citation of Moberg’s original 1984 publication. Researchers and clinicians are free to utilize, reproduce, and adapt the scale without commercial royalty fees. For extensive institutional reproduction or inclusion within commercial clinical assessment software, reference to the historical proceedings of the Spiritual Well-Being Conference (Program for Continuing Education in Nursing, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI 53233) is recommended.

References

Hoge, D. R., & Roozen, D. A. (Eds.). (1979). Understanding church growth and decline: 1950–1978. Pilgrim Press.

Kelley, D. M. (1977). Why conservative churches are growing: A study in sociology of religion. Harper & Row.

Koenig, H. G., Moberg, D. O., & Kvale, J. N. (1988). Religious activities and attitudes of older adults in a geriatric assessment clinic. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 36(4), 362–374. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-5415.1988.tb02365.x

Mickley, J. R., Soeken, K., & Belcher, A. (1992). Spiritual well-being, religiousness and hope among women with breast cancer. Image: The Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 24(4), 267–272. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1547-5069.1992.tb00732.x

Moberg, D. O. (1980). Social indicators of spiritual well-being. In J. A. Thorson & T. C. Cook Jr. (Eds.), Spiritual well-being of the elderly (pp. 20–37). Charles C. Thomas.

Moberg, D. O. (1984). Subjective measures of spiritual well-being. Review of Religious Research, 25(4), 351–359. https://doi.org/10.2307/3511394

Paloutzian, R. F., & Ellison, C. W. (1982). Loneliness, spiritual well-being and the quality of life. In L. A. Peplau & D. Perlman (Eds.), Loneliness: A sourcebook of current theory, research and therapy (pp. 224–237). John Wiley & Sons.

Reed, P. G. (1986). Religiousness among terminally ill and healthy adults. Research in Nursing & Health, 9(1), 35–41. https://doi.org/10.1002/nur.4770090107

Reed, P. G. (1992). An emerging paradigm for the investigation of spirituality in nursing. Research in Nursing & Health, 15(5), 349–357. https://doi.org/10.1002/nur.4770150505

Wagner, C. P. (1976). Your church can grow: Seven vital signs of a healthy church. Regal Books.

Wagner, C. P., & Johnson, A. (1977). Intensity of belief: A pragmatic concern for church growth. Christianity Today, 21, 372–382.

Walton, C. G., Shultz, C. M., Beck, C. M., & Walls, R. C. (1991). Psychological correlates of loneliness in the older adult. Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 5(3), 165–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/0883-9417(91)90018-T

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)