Walking Down the Sunny Side of the Street: Three Studies Developing a Spiritually Nuanced Measure of Optimism

Abstract

Across a series of studies, an effort was made to operationalize optimism in a spiritually nuanced fashion. In the first study, it was proposed and tested that spiritual optimism might consist of two factors: “here and now” and “end of story” optimism. However, a second study suggested that spiritual optimism had more of a unitary quality. The second study also suggested that the construct of spiritual optimism was separate from the construct of hope. The third study confirmed the unitary nature of the spiritual optimism measure and provided evidence for the construct validity of the measure. Spiritual optimism was directly related to a general measure of coping and a measure of religious coping. The relationships between spiritual optimism and different types of religious coping appeared stronger than between spiritual optimism and the more general measures of coping.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Portions of the first study reported in this article were presented at the Second Annual Division 36 Mid-Winter Research Conference on Religion and Spirituality, Baltimore, MD. Portions of the second and third studies were presented at the annual meeting of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies, Dallas, TX. We thank Kate O'Conner for her contribution to this project.

Notes

∗p ≤ .05.

∗∗p ≤ .01.

^aReversed-scored item. A loading in bold type indicates that item loaded on that factor.

∗p ≤ .05.

∗∗p ≤ .01.

^aRange = 0–3.

^bRange = 1–6.

∗p ≤ .05.

∗∗p ≤ .01.

∗p ≤ .05.

∗∗p ≤ .01.