Spirituality as Experienced by Occupational Therapists in Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite considerable literature describing the potential place of spirituality in occupational therapy, surveys repeatedly demonstrate that therapists are uncomfortable with this concept in practice. To gain a better understanding of how spirituality might inform practice, we interviewed eight occupational therapists who stated that they considered spirituality while working with patients. Participants defined spirituality as one's beliefs about the world and one's place in it and how one lives out these beliefs, through reflection and conscious actions. Four themes of consideration of spirituality in practice emerged. In the first, addressing religious concerns, therapists dealt with patients' religious questions and issues. In the second, addressing suffering, therapists assisted patients to deal with their feelings related to loss and pain, attempted to relieve patients' distress and helped patients move towards increased functioning. In the third, encouraging the self, therapists worked to assist patients to acknowledge their own worth and to use their unique gifts and interests. In the fourth, growing as a person, therapists themselves were transformed as a result of the therapeutic encounter. This study represents an early attempt to determine what occupational therapists who consider spirituality actually do in practice. Future research should go deeper into the experience of such therapists, to gain a richer understanding of the phenomenon.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".