A Conceptual Analysis of Spirituality at the End of Life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The definition of spirituality is the subject of endless debates in the empirical literature. This content analysis sought to: (1) exhaustively review the empirical literature on end-of-life spirituality to extract definitional elements of this concept and (2) elaborate on these definitional elements to create an integrative and inclusive definition of end-of-life spirituality based on the items retrieved. A search of the literature on spirituality published in the last 10 years was conducted via the the PsychINFO and MEDLINE databases. Seventy-one articles were selected based on specific inclusion criteria. A qualitative thematic analysis yielded 11 dimensions for the concept of end-of-life spirituality, namely: (1) meaning and purpose in life, (2) self-transcendence, (3) transcendence with a higher being, (4) feelings of communion and mutuality, (5) beliefs and faith, (6) hope, (7) attitude toward death, (8) appreciation of life, (9) reflection upon fundamental values, (10) the developmental nature of spirituality, and (11) its conscious aspect. The definition derived from this concept analysis, after being tested empirically, may be useful in informing the development of new measures of spirituality and new protocols to assess spirituality in clinical settings.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".