Religious and spiritual struggles in a German-speaking sample

We present preliminary results on religious and spiritual struggles in a German-speaking sample (n = 1359) primarily from Switzerland. With these topics having been primarily studied in the United States, we extend the research to more secular societies in the German-speaking world. For this, we administered the Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale (RSS) by Exline et al. (2014), which for the first time was translated and administered in German. As religion and spirituality may serve as valuable resources, but can also cause severe emotional distress and thus have a potentially significant impact on health and well-being, we will compare the results of the RSS as well as the brief RCOPE (Pargament et al. 2011) with questionnaires relating to hope, embitterment, inconsistency, centrality of religion, and depression. In addition to the six subscales (divine, demonic, interpersonal, moral, doubt, ultimate meaning) of the Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale by Exline et al. (2014), an additional subscale on scripture-related struggles will be explored.