introduction: spiritual intelligence is concerned with the inner life of mind and spirit and its relationship to being in the world. spiritual intelligence implies a capacity for a deep understanding of existential questions and insight into multiple levels of consciousness. spiritual intelligence also implies awareness of spirit as the ground of being or as the creative life force of evolution...

More and more families include a member who is trans-identified, and therefore, may be called to consider how sex and gender matter to identity and relationships. Previous research shows that for some family members this is not a simple matter. Often, family members experience transition as a living death, wherein the trans-identified person is perceived as somehow present and absent, the same ...

Hope plays an important role in the illness experience, yet it is a difficult concept to articulate, given its complex intangible nature. To develop a model for capturing the personal meaning of hope in health and illness, I developed a questionnaire and distributed it to 550 healthy adults, adults with illness experience, and nurses. Major findings from this study suggest that people experienc...

OBJECTIVE To explore what lies behind repeated emergency department (ED) use, from the patients' own perspectives. METHODS Qualitative study based on in depth interviews with frequent users of the ED at the Huddinge University Hospital, Sweden. Ten adult patients having visited the ED 6-17 times in the previous 12 months were interviewed. The personal meaning they attached to the symptoms and...

To explore the significance of repeated memories for individuals' personal histories, we compared the characteristics of young adults' unique and repeated memories of childhood experiences. Memory type (unique vs. repeated) was a within-participant variable. In Experiment 1, college-age participants generated as many early memories as possible in 4 minutes; in Experiment 2, another sample provi...

Personal Projects Analysis (B. R. Little, 1983) was adapted to examine relations between participants' appraisals of their goal characteristics and orthogonal happiness and meaning factors that emerged from factor analyses of diverse well-being measures. In two studies with 146 and 179 university students, goal efficacy was associated with happiness and goal integrity was associated with meanin...

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the process of transformation of personal beliefs, values, feelings, and knowledge (meaning perspectives) underlying occupational change in a small group of clients with rheumatoid arthritis during home-based rehabilitation. A grounded theory approach used to collect and analyze data concurrently included: (1) a sample of five adult clients d...

Successful aging is gaining increasing attention given the growth in the older adult population. Criteria and definitions within multiple disciplines vary greatly in Western literature, with no consensus on its meaning. Sociocultural, economic, and political differences between the Western view of successful aging and its view in China add to the confusion. Similarities and differences in the m...

As part of a cross-sectional, quantitative study on adjustment factors in long-term breast cancer survival, 52 women were asked to write in their own words how religious and spiritual factors played a part in their understanding of and coping with this illness. A subsample of 39 women responded to this question. The qualitative method of content analysis was used to define meaning units, descri...