Quality of Life and Spirituality in Indian University Students
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Quality of Life and Spirituality in Indian University Students Sibnath Deb 1 & Esben Strodl 2
Received: 19 December 2016 / Accepted: 6 March 2018 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature and The International Society for Qualityof-Life Studies (ISQOLS) 2018
Abstract University students can experience low levels of quality of life (QoL). Previous research has indicated a positive relationship between spirituality and QoL. The objective of this study was to examine the association between QoL and spirituality in Indian post-graduate university students. It was hypothesised that higher levels of QoL would be associated with higher levels of spiritual beliefs, spiritual practices, sense of purpose/connectedness and sense of hope/control after adjusting for a range of demographic variables and perceived social support. A group of 475 post-graduate university students (241 males and 234 females) from Pondicherry, India, participated in this cross-sectional study. Data was collected by using demographics, as well as the World Health Organisation’s QoL-BREF Questionnaire and the Spirituality Attitude Inventory. The results indicated that religiosity was not associated with QoL in this sample. However existential wellbeing was independently associated with Physical Health QoL, Psychological QoL, and Environmental QoL; while a sense of hope/ control was independently associated with Physical Health QoL, Social QoL and Environmental QoL. Negative religious coping had the strongest association with all of the measures of QoL. These results provide evidence that higher levels of spirituality are associated with higher levels of QoL in Indian university students. The findings of the study support the need for further interventional studies examining the promotion of spirituality in Indian university students in order to improve their QoL. Keywords Spirituality . Religiosity . Quality of life . University students . India
* Sibnath Deb [email protected]
1
Department of Applied Psychology, Pondicherry University, Puducherry, India
2
School of Psychology and Counselling, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia
S. Deb, E. Strodl
University students throughout the world can experience low levels of Quality of Life (QoL). For example, Swedish university students have been shown to have lower levels of QoL than their working counterparts (Vaez et al. 2006). Similar findings have been found among Brazilian medical students (Lins et al. 2015). Other studies have found levels of QoL comparable to community norms, with notable exceptions in specific domains. For example, American university students studying pharmacy have shown a lower QoL in the domain of mental health (Marshall et al. 2008), which is consistent with medical and dental students in Saudi Arabia (Aboalshamat et al. 2014) and Germany (Burger et al. 2016) having high levels of depression, anxiety and stress. In contrast, Serbian university students (Pekmezovic et al. 2011) and Canadian university students (Raj et al. 2
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