"Moved by the Spirit": Does Spirituality Moderate the Interrelationships Between Subjective Well-Being Subscales?

Despite the recent escalation of research into the spirituality and wellbeing link, past efforts have been plagued by methodological problems. However, the potential for measurement error within psychometric instruments remains largely unexplored. After reviewing theory and evidence suggesting spirituality might represent an affective misattribution, moderation modeling-with each subjective well-being (SWB) subscale as a dependent variable as predicted by the remaining SWB subscales-is utilized to test the assumption of scale invariance. These interrelationships were shown to vary in conjunction with spirituality; that is the analysis revealed significant spirituality x subscale interactions. Importantly, in all models the spirituality main effect was either nonsignificant or accounted for by other predictors. In combination, the findings suggest the interrelationship between the subscales rather than the level of SWB varies systematically with spirituality and casts considerable doubt on the previously reported "belief-as-benefit" effect. (C) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol: 66:709-725, 2010.