Call and Response: A Six-Wave Study of Bidirectional Links Between Religiosity and Spirituality Among Pakistani Muslims During Ramadan

Religiosity and spirituality are intimately connected concepts. Numerous studies have jointly assessed religiosity and spirituality, but the causal associations between them have seldomly been examined. With six waves of data from a sample of n = 212 Pakistani Muslim students, we used random-intercept cross-lagged panel modeling to examine the reciprocal associations of religiosity and spirituality from before to after Ramadan in 2020. We observed three key findings. First, we demonstrated the strong measurement invariance of the recently refined and revalidated measures of Muslim religiosity and spirituality. Second, we observed increases in religiosity and spirituality during Ramadan. Third, the results supported a bidirectional link between religiosity and spirituality, but the timing of the directional associations varied. Whereas religiosity was associated with higher subsequent spirituality during Ramadan, spirituality near the end of Ramadan was associated with higher subsequent religiosity after Ramadan. This study provides important insight into temporal linkages between religiosity and spirituality among non-Western adherents of Islam. More generally, these findings highlight the potential for research designs that leverage naturally occurring religious events to enrich our understanding of the psychology of religion and spirituality.