Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: There has been an increasing momentum in the field of marriage and family therapy to attune the therapy process to the client’s socio-culture influences; however when this socio-cultural influence includes spirituality there is often a restraint in the attuning. While there are several explanations for this, two rationales rise to the surface: therapist not feeling adequately trained to attune to spirituality and lack of validated tools to effectively measure this socio-cultural influence of spirituality. When working with couple’s this can be even more complicated as validated dyadic measures are limited and those that exist usually measure spirituality through a global measure such as church attendance. Additionally, these measures were created and are often operationalized as individual assessment of spirituality/religion. The Marital Selflessness Scale (MSS) is a dyadic measure that was validated through an exploratory factor analysis revealing three latent factors: Relational Expectations; Relational Empowerment; Relational Selflessness. A therapist can utilize the MSS with confidence when working with a couple who are part of a Christian socio-cultural influence. The results of the dyadic MSS attune the therapist to the couple’s values of unconditional love and selflessness in the marriage, provides direction for developing couple goals, and gives the therapist a language into creating effective interventions.
Author: Marj Buchholz-Castronova
Language: English
Subfield: Health
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funders: Loma Linda University, Strong
OpenAlex ID: W2336219398