Spirituality, religion, and health: a critical appraisal of the Larson reports.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The four-volume corpus The Faith Factor, and Scientific Research on Spirituality and Health: A Consensus Report by Larson et al constitute the largest English-language review of research on spirituality and health. We have done a critique of the 329 systematic analyses of peer-reviewed research papers presented therein. The objectives were to determine if the Larson conclusions can be generalized; to document the understanding of the potential of qualitative research in assessing the spiritual domain; and to examine whether the definitions of religion and spirituality used by Larson et al correspond to those in general use. We conclude that their results cannot be generalized to other religious and cultural settings; that there is a need for more research focusing on age groups, cultures, religions, and clinical settings not adequately represented in studies to date; and that the need for more qualitative research methods justifies a detailed analysis of the use of qualitative methods in the studies reviewed by the Larson group. Finally, there is a need to establish a common vocabulary that bridges cultural and religious traditions, and facilitates clinical care, research, and teaching relating to spirituality, religion, and health.
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 | 0.126 | 0.316 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.036 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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".