Catholic Identity and Spiritual Well-Being of Students in a Philippine Catholic University

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.32871/rmrj1907.02.04

Keywords:

religious education, catholic identity, spiritual well-being, college students, catholic university, Philippines

Abstract

This paper primarily compares the spiritual well-being of students in a Catholic university classified according to their self-ascribed identity as creative and orthodox Catholics. With the use of a survey questionnaire, the demographic and academic profile and church involvement of students were first established and subsequently associated with their self-ascribed Catholic identity using Chi-square test. Meanwhile, the spiritual wellbeing of students was measured using the standardized 20-item Spiritual Well-Being Scale (SWBS) test developed by Paloutzian and Ellison (1982). The t-test and one-way Analysis of Variance were employed to differentiate the spiritual well-being scores of students grouped according to their demographic and academic profile and church involvement. This paper shows that the orthodox Catholics significantly scored higher in spiritual well-being than the creative Catholics. Thus, teaching the meanings of Catholic beliefs and practices should be enriched with practical relevance so students would consider them not merely as part of Catholic rituals.

Author Biography

Enrique G. Oracion, Silliman University

 

Enrique G. Oracion, Ph.D. is a Professor of Sociology and Anthropology and currently the Research Director of Silliman University in Dumaguete City, Philippines.

 Dennis V. Madrigal, Ph.D. is a Professor of Religious Education and the Associate Dean of the Recoletos de Bacolod Graduate School of the University of Negros Occidental-Recoletos in Bacolod City. 

References

Ammerman, N. T. (2013). Spiritual but not religious? Beyond binary choices in the study of religion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 52(2), 258-278.

Basu, S., Zuo, X., Lou, C., Acharya, R., & Lundgren, R. (2017). Learning to be gendered: gender socialization in early adolescence among urban poor in Delhi, India, and Shanghai, China. Journal of Adolescent Health, 61(4), S24-S29.

Bautista, Julius J. (2010). Figuring Catholicism: An ethnohistory of the Santo Niño de Cebu. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

Buchko, K. J. (2004). Religious beliefs and practices of college women as compared to college men. Journal of College Student Development, 45(1), 89-98.

Bufford, R. K., Paloutzian, R. F., & Ellison, C. W. (1991). Norms for the Spiritual Weil-Being Scale. Journal of psychology and theology, 19(1), 56-70.

Chirico, F. (2016). Spiritual well-being in the 21st century: It’s time to review the current WHO’s health definition. Journal of Health and Social Sciences, 1(1), 11-16.

Cornelio, J. S., & Raffin, A. (2009). The Catholic Church and education as sources of institutional panic in the Philippines. Asian Journal of Social Science, 37(5), 778-798.

Cornelio, J. S. (2016). Being Catholic in the contemporary Philippines: Young people reinterpreting religion. USA: Routledge.

Cornelio, Jayeel S. (2018). Young people and the challenges of religious education in the Philippines. In Fabrizio Meroni (ed.) Youth, the Catholic Church, and religions in Asia. Italy: Urbaniana University Press. Pp. 79-112.

Genia, V. (2001). Evaluation of the spiritual well-being scale in a sample of college students. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 11(1), 25-33.

Hill, P. C., & Hood, R. W. (Eds.). (1999). Measures of religiosity (pp. 119-58). Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press.

Madrigal, D. V. and Oracion, E. G. (2018). Religiosity and spiritual well-being of students in a Philippine Catholic university. Paper presented during the Philippine Sociological Society 2018 National Conference held in Siquijor State College, Larena, Siquijor, October 4-6, 2018.

Madrigal, D. V., & Oracion, E. G. (2018). Rethinking Catholic Education: Experiences of Teachers of a Catholic University. Recoletos Multidisciplinary Research Journal, 6(1), 13-26.

Malinakova, K., Kopcakova, J., Kolarcik, P., Geckova, A. M., Solcova, I. P., Husek, V., ... & van Dijk, J. P. (2017). The Spiritual Well-Being Scale: Psychometric evaluation of the shortened version in Czech adolescents. Journal of religion and health, 56 (2), 697-705.

Paloutzian, R. F., & Ellison, C. W. (1982). Loneliness, spiritual well-being and the quality of life. Loneliness: A sourcebook of current theory, research and therapy, 224-237.

Social Weather Stations (2018). Attendance at religious services among adults, Philippines, 1991-2017, Retrieved on 2 September 2018 from https://www.sws.org.ph/swsmain/artcldisppage/?artcsyscode=ART-20180328121738

Downloads

Published

2019-12-31

How to Cite

Oracion, E. G., & Madrigal, D. V. (2019). Catholic Identity and Spiritual Well-Being of Students in a Philippine Catholic University. Recoletos Multidisciplinary Research Journal, 7(2), 47–60. https://doi.org/10.32871/rmrj1907.02.04

Issue

Section

Articles

Most read articles by the same author(s)