The Spiritual Needs Questionnaire
The Spiritual Needs Questionnaire (SpNQ), developed in 2010 by Arndt Büssing, is an established standardized measure of existential and spiritual needs.
Addressing unmet spiritual needs, primarily by health professionals but also by psychologists and chaplains, requires specific Spiritual Care Competences. Such needs can be assessed either in personal (anamnestic) talks or in a standardized way to quantify the strength of unmet needs.
Introduction to the SpNQ
The underlying theoretical basis for the SpNQ refers to four core dimensions of spiritual needs, i.e., Connection, Peace, Meaning/Purpose, and Transcendence. These were divided into categories of social, emotional, existential, and religious needs.
Spiritual needs addressed by the SpNQ can be further categorized according to Alderfer's model of Relatedness, Existential, and Growth needs, i.e., Relatedness in terms of a connection with others or the Sacred, Existential in terms of needs to find states of inner peace, hope, and forgiveness, and Growth in terms of meaning in life, self-realization, and related aspects.
The questionnaire can be used either as a structured assessment tool with 27 items (plus 3 free-text fields) for documentation purposes and to facilitate counselling conversation, or as a 20-item research instrument (SpNQ-20). The SpNQ-20 differentiates four main factors:
- Religious Needs
- Needs for Inner Peace
- Existential Needs
- Giving / Generativity Needs
The 4-factorial structure was verified in a sample of patients with chronic diseases, older adults, and also healthy adults and relatives. These factors are in line with the definition of spirituality as described by the European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC).
- For adolescents, a 15-item reduced version (Cronbach´s alpha = .87) with some new items to cover the topic of Attention / Positive Confirmation was validated.
- A reduced 10-item SpNQ Screener (Cronbach´s alpha = .79) for people with reduced vitality is available
- A Spiritual Distress Screener with 10 items is also available.
Working with the SpNQ in a clinical setting
The SpNQ was developed to assess patients' unmet existential/spiritual needs in a structured and standardized way. It is, first of all, a resource-oriented diagnostic instrument that allows both communication and documentation. Some basic information for its use can be found here.
The process of implementation can be described in five phases, starting from assessment of a person´s spiritual needs, planning of support options, consensus finding with the person in need, and subsequent re-evaluation processes, whether and to what extent the respective spiritual needs have been met.
For more information, see: Büssing A. (Ed.) Spiritual Needs in Research and Practice. The Spiritual Needs Questionnaire as a Global Resource for Health and Social Care. Cham: Pelgrave Mcmillan (2021).