Healing Through Faith: The Role of Spiritual Healers in Providing Psychosocial Support to Canadian Muslims
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies have documented on the role of religious leaders in providing psychosocial support to their members. However, there is a dearth of research in understanding the role imams play among Muslim communities in the Canadian context. The few studies that were undertaken in Europe and the United States revealed that imams played a significant role in addressing the psychosocial needs of their congregants, and this role increased in the post-9/11 era.This study explored experiences of imams in the provision of psychosocial support to Muslim Canadians, including new immigrants and refugees. We conducted in-depth, one-on-one interviews with faith leaders in a major metropolitan Canadian city. The data was transcribed and thematically analyzed using NVIVO. The study revealed that spiritual healing is considered the first line of care for psychosocial illness, and imams are considered the primary support network. The findings revealed that war-related traumas and post-resettlement challenges have significant impact on family functions and well-being.This study highlighted the need for culturally appropriate psychosocial support services for Muslim Canadians, including new immigrants and refugees. It also calls for better collaboration between service agencies and faith-based organizations in the communities to address these specific needs.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".