Spiritual Health and Its Determinants Among Urban Adolescents in Northern India: A Cross-Sectional Survey.

INTRODUCTION

Spiritual health is an important dimension of positive health and is often ignored as it is not amenable to measurement. The present study was conducted to generate relevant evidence on spiritual health among adolescents living in urban areas of Northern India.

METHODS

A cross-sectional study was done from June 2019 - May 2020 in an urban area of Northern India on a sample of 300 adolescents selected purposively. After collection of demographic details of the participants, the Index of Core Spiritual Experiences (INSPIRIT) tool was used to capture their spiritual health.

RESULTS

The Cronbach's alpha for the scale was 0.832 (0.797-0.863) indicating good internal consistency of the measure. As far as spiritual health is concerned, 217 (72.3%) of the study participants scored medium-high to high, followed by 83 (27.7%) who scored medium-low to low on the spiritual health scale. Adjusted multivariate analysis using binary logistic regression showed that positive traits like caring (odds ratio (OR) 1.19, 95% CI: 1.08-1.33), connection to school (OR 1.16, 95% CI: 1.04-1.29), having positive identity (OR 1.19, 95% CI: 1.04-1.36) and having highly educated (post-graduate) parents (OR 2.18, 95% CI: 1.13-4.21) lead to significantly higher spiritual health scores.  Discussion: Although spiritual health is not routinely measured among adolescents, the current study demonstrated high levels of spiritual health among half of the urban adolescents. Parental education was found to have a positive association with spiritual health scores, indicating the indirect effect of parental spiritual inclination. The study has important implications for policy, as it demonstrates the feasibility of measuring a covert dimension of health which tends to have an indirect effect on holistic youth development.