Spiritual Assessment Scale;Psychometric Evaluation of the Korean Version

한국어판 영성측정도구(SAS)의 신뢰도와 타당도 검증연구

Spirituality has been found as a factor that may influence an individual's health and response to illness and dying. The purpose of this study was to assess the reliability and validity of the Korean version of the Howden's Spiritual Assessment Scale(SAS). The SAS was developed based on the attributes of spirituality and constructed with 28 items, 4 subscales. The translation involved four steps : translation into Korean, checking agreement, back translation into English, and arriving at a consensus. Psychometric evaluation was done on 222 nurses from five hospitals. All responses were voluntary and anonymous. The Cronbach's alpa coefficient for internal consistency was .928 for the total 28 items and .700${\sim}$.805 for subdimensions. Item- total correlations ranged from .36${\sim}$.68. Principal Component Factor Analysis with Varimax Rotation yielded four factors with four or more items each loading at .40 or higher. These factors explained 51.3% of the total variance. The items clustered in this study were almost identical with initial scale. There was positive correlation(r=.648, p=.0001) between SAS and Ellison & Paloutzian's Spiritual Wellbeing Scale and negative correlation(r=-.418, p=.000) with Pines' Burnout Scale which indicate convergent and discriminant validity. In conclusion, this tool can be effectively utilized for assessing spirituality in Korea.