An exploratory factor analysis into the applicability of the Spirituality Care-Giving Scale, the Spirituality and Spiritual Care Rating Scale and the Spirituality in Occupational Therapy Scale to the South African context

Abstract

Spirituality and spiritual care are both considered as important elements of health sciences education; however, limited research has been conducted with occupational therapy students using spirituality scales. Therefore, this study assessed the internal consistency component of reliability and carried out factor analyses of three spirituality scales which examined the perceptions and attitudes of South African undergraduate occupational therapy students regarding spirituality and spiritual care. This study used a cross-sectional survey design using convenience sampling to recruit 100 participants. The internal consistency of the instruments evaluated showed satisfactory reliability: i.e. the Spiritual Care-Giving Scale (α=0.946), the Spirituality and Spiritual Care Rating Scale (α= 0.764) and the Spirituality in Occupational Therapy scale (α=0.868). The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of Sampling Adequacy values was 0.862, 0.883, and 0.868 respectively, indicating the appropriateness of the factor analysis. Factor analysis from varimax rotated results was also performed to identify the patterns of spirituality and spiritual care within the instruments. The total variances of the instruments were acceptable at 59.1, 67.6 and 69.8% respectively. An implication of these findings is the possibility that exposing occupational therapy students to spirituality and spiritual care could be useful for them to gain insight into and be sensitive to the clients’ spiritual needs. Further research should be undertaken in other institutions of higher learning that offer occupational therapy programmes.