International Study of Chaplains’ Attitudes About Research

Abstract

An online survey was conducted by twelve professional chaplain organizations to assess chaplains’ attitudes about and involvement in research. A total of 2,092 chaplains from 23 countries responded to the survey. Over 80% thought research was definitely important and nearly 70% thought chaplains should definitely be research literate. Just over 40% said they regularly read research articles and almost 60% said they occasionally did. The respondents rated their own research literacy as 6.5 on a 0–10 scale. Significant positive inter-correlations were found among all four measures: importance of (a) research and (b) research literacy; (c) frequency of reading articles; and (d) research literacy rating. Approximately 35% were never involved, 37% had been involved, 17% were currently involved, and 11% expected to be involved in research. The last three groups were significantly more likely to think research and research literacy were important and to read research articles than chaplains who were never involved in research. Given chaplains’ interest in research, actions should be undertaken to facilitate further research engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• attitudes
• chaplain
• international
• research
• survey

Notes

The organizations were: Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (USA); Association of Professional Chaplains (USA); Canadian Association for Spiritual Care; College of Health Care Chaplains (UK); Dutch Association of Spiritual Caregivers in Care Settings; Health Care Chaplaincy Network (USA); National Association of Catholic Chaplains (USA); Neshama: Association of Jewish Chaplains (USA); New Zealand Healthcare Chaplains Association; Pediatric Chaplains’ Network (USA); Professional Chaplaincy Advisors England; Spiritual Care Australia; and Chaplains associated with the former Scottish Association of Chaplains in Health Care.

Some psychometricians might argue that psychological scales do not have a true zero point, which is necessary for a scale to be a ratio scale. However, even if this is so, the research literacy measure is at least an interval scale, which can be analyzed by ANOVA or ANCOVA.

The full name of the Kruskal-Wallis test is the Kruskal-Wallis One-Way Analysis of Variance by Ranks, which is a nonparametric equivalent of one-way analysis of variance.

Odds Ratios (OR) define the ratio of the odds of an event occurring in one group compared to another group. Odds are the probability of an event occurring divided by the probability of an event not occurring. An odds ratio of 1, therefore, indicates the odds are equal in both groups. An odds ratio of four indicates the event is four times more likely to occur in one group than another. The ordinal regression analyses used in the current study assumed that the OR between each level of research involvement would be proportional.