Resumo

ARANCIBIA, Héctor; CARDENAS, Manuel  e  CERUTI, Cristián. Validation of the Spiritual Practices Scale with victims of political violence in Chile. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2022, vol.39, n.1, pp.211-222.  Epub 06-Out-2021. ISSN 1668-7027.  http://dx.doi.org/10.16888/interd.2022.39.1.13.

Spirituality, or what motivates the search for the sacred from particular and free positions, allows us to provide a framework from which to interpret the experience of loss and suffering, contributing in different ways to the resignification and re-authorship of people after the trauma. It is related to resilience, with that ability to overcome adverse events. It favors the mitigation of the negative effects of the traumatic event and fosters healthy and successful psychological development –despite the suffering caused by an external situation– by promoting the construction and redefinition of people's life purpose –one of the central components of human well-being–, being especially relevant in those who have been victims of trauma. Thus, spirituality can contribute to the reconfiguration of the narrative about the survived experience from practices that promote spiritual emotion such as the actions of meditating or praying, the latter considered as one of the mechanisms of self-revelation that is fundamental within the post traumatic growth process.

Spirituality and religion maintain a complex interrelation that at times makes difficult the distinction between them. However, this distinction is especially sensitive and necessary when it comes to accounting for spirituality in people who do not profess a theistic faith. This is the case of a significant part of people with left-wing ideologies –who suffered some type of violence during the military dictatorships implanted from the second half of the 20th century in Latin America. Particularly in Chile, the civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990) was especially cruel with people of left-wing ideologies, many of them not ascribed to a belief of a theistic order.

In this context, it is relevant to account for spiritual practices –differentiating them from religious beliefs– in relation to post-traumatic growth in people victims of political violence. For this objective we have proposed in this article the validation of the short version of the Parsian and Dunning (2009) Spiritual Practice Scale. For this purpose, we utilized a sample of adult people victims of political violence in Chile during the military dictatorship between 1973 and 1990 (n = 251, M = 60.85, DT = 13.40). To assess the structure of the scale, we estimated a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The reliability index was calculated (α = .85) and the convergent validity was assessed with a series of bivariate correlations between variables. As expected, the CFA reports an adequate adjustment to the unifactorial structure and the results show the significant relationship between spiritual practices and post-traumatic growth (r = .45), and between spiritual practices with religiosity (r = .29). Being the relationship between spiritual practices and religiosity medium-low, it allows us to conclude that although they are related, they are different constructs. From the analysis of the data, it cannot be concluded that there is a relationship between spiritual practices with age and income level. In conclusion, the short version of the Spiritual Practices Scale presents adequate levels of reliability and validity, so it is recommended to be used in the measurement of spiritual practices, especially in those populations that do not adhere to a theistic faith.

Palavras-chave : Spiritual Practices Scale; political violence; post-traumatic growth; religiosity; Chile.

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