Spirituality & Religion in Coping with Chronic Pain
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Spirituality, Religion, and Meaning-Making in Effective Coping and Adaptation for Chronic Pain Patients: A Qualitative Study.
IRAS ID
172339
Contact name
Louis Viladent
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Royal United Hospital
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 1 months, 1 days
Research summary
Over the past few years, there has been an increasing interest in the role of spirituality as a coping strategy in some sections of the health profession such as palliative care. However it has received very little attention in in the field of pain management. Indeed, in 2013, the results of a search for the words “pain” and “spirituality”, even though increasing from 50 in 2011, reached about 1,000 citations. This still represents a very small portion (approx. 0.1%) of the pain literature. Spiritual concerns have an enormous influence over behaviors and over the meaning one makes of unfortunate events (Hayes, 1984). Consequently, suffering often leads to seek and wonder about the meaning and purpose of life. Glover-Graf et al. (2007) shed light upon the fact that the psychological field has historically been concerned with beliefs, attitudes, and values, but that spirituality has often been regarded as private and personal: perhaps by fear of individual interpretation or by fear of imposing one’s own spiritual values.
Findings regarding the impact of spirituality and religion on mental and physical health within the chronic pain population have been highly scattered. Firstly, this is due to the exclusive usage of quantitative methods to study concepts that would benefit from qualitative methods regarding their subtle and nuanced nature. Indeed, the current body of research on spirituality, religion, and chronic pain has made only assumptions of what it means to be religious or spiritual in a chronic pain population. Secondly, studies are rare in trying to explore the middle ground between spiritual language and their secular and cognitive equivalent. As such, this study is aimed at exploring what spirituality and religion mean in a chronic pain population as well as the interaction between spirituality, religion, meaning-making of pain, and secular coping strategies.REC name
South Central - Hampshire B Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/SC/0198
Date of REC Opinion
24 Apr 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion