Children’s spirituality: epistemology and theory from various helping professions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Children’s spirituality is a rising area of importance in research within other helping disciplines, which social work should attend to. Epistemology is an important element of research that is often difficult to discern. This article discusses the different epistemological paradigms and identifies pertinent theories in relation to some of the significant studies on spirituality in preadolescent children. There is a lack of valid and reliable scales specific to children from a postpositivist stance. Constructivism appears as a prevalent epistemology within the literature, underpinned with humanist, existential, and transpersonal theories. Current research is often grounded in James Fowler’s faith development, founded on constructivist child development theory. Research is contributing to the recognition of the unique characteristics of spirituality in children that include relational consciousness and meaning-making, and coping styles. Gender, context, and culture aspects are also identified as important concerns for children’s spirituality that are introduced within social constructionist research. There remains considerable room for expansion in research on children’s spirituality and theory development especially in social work.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".