Developing a definition of spiritual health for Canadian young people: a qualitative study

Figures & data

Table 1. Characteristics of study participants

Characteristics		# of participants
Total		74
Gender
	Male	26
	Female	48
Age
	10–11	6
	12–13	20
	14–15	43
	16–18	5
Religious self-identification
	Christian	19
	Muslim	13
	No details provided as to religious beliefs	41
	Self-identified as atheist	1
Geographic location
	British Columbia	20
	Alberta	2
	Ontario	39
	Quebec	1
	Nova Scotia	2
	Prince Edward Island	3
	Nunavut	7

Table 2. Tasks used for generating data

Task	Description
1. Describe a person.	Participants were asked to describe a person whom they would consider to have positive spiritual health.
2. Choose a picture. (Focus groups only.)	Twenty letter-size picture cards were prepared in consultation with our project youth advisory group. They reflected a wide variety of elements of spirituality that are found in the literature. Participants were invited to choose one card that said something to them about what spiritual health is or is not and then to explain their choice.
3. Card sort.	Participants were each given a deck of eight cards. Each card depicted one of the four domains (2 cards per domain). Participants were asked to sort the cards into order of the connections that were most to least important to supporting their daily challenges and then to explain their choices.
4. Tell a story. (Interviews only.)	Participants were asked to consider how they coped when things were tough in their lives, and then to reflect on whether or not anything we had discussed in relation to spiritual health had helped them to cope.
5. Engage with a definition.	Beginning with a definition that was rooted in the four domains framework (Michaelson et al. 2016), participants were invited to engage with the definition individually, circling anything they thought was important; crossing out anything that shouldn’t be there; putting a question mark beside anything they didn’t understand; and adding anything they thought was missing. We then discussed their insights together (during the focus group or interview), and afterwards I updated the definition to include these insights. The exercise was repeated iteratively with different individual children or groups of children throughout the study.

Figure 1. Perceptions of spiritual health identified as important by Canadian young people

Michaelson, V., F. Brooks, I. Jirásek, J. Inchley, R. Whitehead, N. King, S. Walsh, C. M. Davison, J. Mazur, and W. Pickett. 2016. “Developmental Patterns of Adolescent Spiritual Health in Six Countries.” SSM - Population Health 2: 294–303. doi:10.1016/j.ssmph.2016.03.006.

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