LAUSR

Spiritual well-being is increasingly recognized as a distinctive, important, and cross-cultural concept in quality of life assessment. The Spiritual Quality of Life-9 subscale (SQOL-9) of the World Health Organization’s Quality of Life Spirituality, Religiousness, and Personal Beliefs brief instrument (WHOQOL-SRPB BREF) was designed to facilitate cross-cultural assessment of SQOL among people who are neither religious nor spiritual (NRS), spiritual but not religious (SNR), and religious and spiritual (RS). The present study (N = 2003 adults) sought to examine the SQOL-9 factor structure, measurement equivalence/invariance, degree of redundancy with positive religious coping, and relationship with well-being (e.g., meaning in life, satisfaction with life, physical health, and mental health) across these three groups. Results suggested that the SQOL-9 is defined by two factors. The first factor (“spiritual coping QOL”) lacked metric invariance between the NRS and RS, suggesting that the meaning of this factor differs for these two groups. It also showed evidence of empirical redundancy with positive religious coping among the RS. This factor was either inversely related, or unrelated, to well-being within each group, suggesting it may function as a proxy for stress when the second factor (“existential QOL”) is accounted for. However, the existential QOL factor was robustly associated with wellbeing for all groups. Invariance results indicated this factor had a similar conceptual meaning across the three groups, but the observed mean scores are not always directly comparable. In summary, the SQOL-9 demonstrated important strengths and limitations for the assessment of SQOL across diverse worldviews.