Religious and Spiritual Struggles & Coping in a German-speaking sample

We present preliminary results on religious and spiritual struggles and how these are coped with in a German-speaking sample (n=1359) primarily from Switzerland. While these topics have been primarily studied in the United States, we extend this research to more secular societies in the German-speaking world, where a lack of data still exists. While inner religious and spiritual struggles are likely to exist in more secular samples too, it cannot be assumed that results from American samples can be readily transferred. This joint research project between clinical psychology and psychology of religion aims to identify which inner religious and spiritual struggles are prevalent and to assess religious coping styles in secular society. In addition to the six subscales of the Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale (RSS) developed by Exline et al. (2014), we added a subscale on scripture-related struggles, which will be explored. For the first time, this questionnaire was translated into and administered in the German language. As religion and spirituality may serve as valuable resources and have a potentially significant impact on health and well-being, but can also cause severe emotional distress, we will compare the results of the RSS and the brief RCOPE (Pargament et al. 2011) with questionnaires relating to hope, embitterment, inconsistency, centrality of religion, and depression. This study opens the door for future research on religious and spiritual struggles in the German-speaking and more secularized world.