Spiritual Experience Index (SEI) – REVISED (SEI-R)

Abstract

The Spiritual Experience Index – Revised (SEI-R) is a 23-item self-report psychometric instrument developed by Vicky Genia (1997) to measure spiritual maturity across diverse religious, spiritual, and non-traditional belief systems. Originating as an extensive revision of the original 38-item Spiritual Experience Index (Genia, 1991), the SEI-R addresses key methodological and psychometric limitations by eliminating ambiguous items, reducing cross-loadings, and refining its two-dimensional structure. The instrument assesses two distinct yet interrelated dimensions of functional spiritual development: Spiritual Support (13 items), which gauges the extent to which an individual derives a sense of meaning, purpose, emotional sustenance, and personal security from a relationship with a transcendent power or spiritual worldview; and Spiritual Openness (10 items), which evaluates cognitive flexibility, tolerance for ideological ambiguity, ecumenism, and the rejection of rigid, dogmatic fundamentalism.

Responses on the SEI-R are recorded on a 6-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 6 (“Strongly Agree”), with four items on the Spiritual Openness subscale requiring reverse-scoring. Extensive psychometric evaluations demonstrate that the SEI-R possesses robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha values typically ranging from .89 to .95 for Spiritual Support and .70 to .80 for Spiritual Openness) and strong construct validity. Factor analytic studies consistently confirm the two-factor orthogonal or modestly oblique structure. The SEI-R has proven especially valuable in clinical psychology, counseling, health psychology, and the empirical study of religion, as it enables clinicians and researchers to discriminate between psychologically mature, adaptive spiritual orientations and defensive, dogmatic, or rigid religious coping strategies without intrinsic denominational bias.

Keywords

Spiritual Experience Index Revised, SEI-R, Spiritual Support, Spiritual Openness, spiritual maturity, psychology of religion, psychometrics, intrinsic religiosity, religious openness, dogmatism

Authors

The Spiritual Experience Index – Revised was formulated and validated by Dr. Vicky Genia. At the time of the instrument’s revision and publication, Dr. Genia was affiliated with the Department of Psychology and the Student Counseling Center at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., United States.

Dr. Genia’s scholarly work has focused broadly on clinical psychology, the integration of psychotherapy with religious and spiritual concerns, the developmental trajectories of faith, and the psychometric measurement of religious maturity and defensive spiritual coping.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Spiritual Experience Index – Revised (SEI-R) is to provide an objective, non-sectarian, and developmentally grounded operationalization of spiritual maturity. Historically, many empirical instruments designed to assess religiousness were confounded by Judeo-Christian doctrinal specificity, denominational practices (e.g., frequency of church attendance, prayer frequency, or scriptural literalism), or conflations with traditional conservatism. Consequently, such measures proved inadequate for individuals adhering to Eastern traditions, non-theistic spiritualities, mystical frameworks, or non-denominational personal faiths. The SEI-R was explicitly designed to overcome these limitations by assessing functional spiritual experience rather than institutional conformity.

Theoretical Rationale

The theoretical rationale underpinning the SEI-R emerges from developmental psychology and psychodynamic theory, particularly the proposition that healthy spiritual development involves two fundamental capacities: (a) the capacity to form a deep, trustful, affective connection to a transcendent source of meaning that provides solace during existential crises, and (b) the cognitive and interpersonal capacity for openness, epistemic humility, and ideological tolerance. In immature or defensive religious functioning, spiritual commitments are frequently maintained through cognitive closure, dogmatic certainty, external conformity, and out-group derogation. The SEI-R was constructed to decouple spiritual commitment from dogmatism, thereby allowing researchers to identify individuals who possess strong spiritual convictions alongside cognitive openness.

Clinical and Research Applications

In clinical settings, the SEI-R serves as a diagnostic and therapeutic assessment tool. Mental health practitioners utilize the scale to evaluate how a client’s spiritual life functions within their overall psychological architecture. High scores on Spiritual Support paired with low scores on Spiritual Openness may highlight rigid, fundamentalist defenses that hinder psychological flexibility, complicate grief processing, or foster interpersonal alienation. Conversely, high scores on both dimensions indicate an integrated, mature spiritual framework capable of bolstering resilience, post-traumatic growth, and moral agency. In empirical research, the SEI-R is widely used across health psychology, behavioral medicine, and cross-cultural studies to investigate the associations between authentic spiritual well-being, psychological flourishing, existential meaning, and coping with chronic or terminal illness.

Psychological Construct

The SEI-R operationalizes spiritual maturity as a multidimensional construct characterized by the simultaneous expression of transcendent connection and cognitive-developmental openness. Rather than treating spirituality as a homogeneous trait, Genia conceptualized it along two primary dimensions: Spiritual Support and Spiritual Openness.

1. Spiritual Support

The Spiritual Support subscale (comprising 13 items) measures an individual’s affective, existential, and behavioral reliance on a transcendent power, divine presence, or overarching spiritual reality. This dimension reflects an internalized, experiential faith that serves as an anchor for personal identity and existential coherence. Crucial facets of Spiritual Support include:

• Existential Meaning and Purpose: Faith serves as a primary source of life meaning, providing answers to existential questions and directing daily life (e.g., “My faith gives my life meaning and purpose”).
• Affective and Relational Intimacy: The transcendent is experienced not as an abstract dogma or punitive authority, but as an experiential source of unconditional love and comfort (e.g., “My relationship to God is experienced as unconditional love”).
• Coping and Resilience: Spiritual connection provides emotional stability and strength in the face of suffering, existential crises, and tragedy (e.g., “My faith helps me to confront tragedy and suffering”).
• Moral Guidance and Restitution: Spiritual convictions guide ethical decision-making while offering mechanisms for self-forgiveness and psychological restoration after moral transgression (e.g., “My faith enables me to experience forgiveness when I act against my moral conscience”).

2. Spiritual Openness

The Spiritual Openness subscale (comprising 10 items) measures cognitive flexibility, ecumenical appreciation, developmental growth, and the rejection of dogmatic exclusivism within one’s spiritual journey. It gauges whether an individual approaches spiritual truth as an evolving, open-ended quest or as a static, closed doctrinal system. Crucial facets of Spiritual Openness include:

• Ecumenical and Inter-Faith Valuing: Recognition that spiritual wisdom and truth exist outside one’s own immediate religious framework (e.g., “Ideas from faiths different from my own may increase my understanding of spiritual truth”).
• Rejection of Doctrinal Dogmatism and Exclusivism: Freedom from rigid fundamentalism, represented by the disagreement with ideological infallibility or social segregation (e.g., reverse-scored items such as “I believe that there is only one true faith” and “One should not marry someone of a different faith”).
• Epistemic Humility and Belief Evolution: Willingness to question inherited dogma, tolerate ambiguity, and allow beliefs to adapt in response to life experiences and intellectual inquiry (e.g., “My spiritual beliefs change as I encounter new ideas and experiences”).
• Universal Humanistic Bond: An underlying perception of universal human kinship and inherent human goodness rather than cynical, dualistic worldview divisions (e.g., “Persons of different faiths share a common spiritual bond”).

Theoretical Framework

The construction and validation of the SEI-R are rooted in developmental psychodynamics, structural-developmental theories of faith, and the social psychology of religious orientations. Genia synthesized several prominent paradigms to establish a rigorous psychometric model of mature spirituality.

Fowler’s Stages of Faith Development

The structural foundation of the SEI-R draws heavily from James Fowler’s (1981) stages of faith development. Fowler proposed that faith evolves from conventional, conformist stages (Stage 3: Synthetic-Conventional), through individualistic, demythologizing stages (Stage 4: Individuative-Reflective), toward integrated, paradoxical, and universalizing orientations (Stage 5: Conjunctive Faith; Stage 6: Universalizing Faith). Conjunctive faith is characterized by the coexistence of passionate personal commitment with deep openness to alternate viewpoints, dialectical humility, and the transcendence of rigid tribal boundaries. The SEI-R’s dual-subscale architecture directly mirrors this developmental zenith: Spiritual Support reflects deep personal commitment, while Spiritual Openness captures the conjunctive capacity to embrace paradox, multivalent truths, and interfaith solidarity.

Allport and Batson: Intrinsic Religiosity and Quest

The SEI-R also interfaces with Gordon Allport’s classical dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity (Allport & Ross, 1967) and Daniel Batson’s conceptualization of religion as Quest (Batson & Schoenrade, 1991). Allport described intrinsic religion as a master motive, lived out for its own sake rather than instrumental gain. However, critics noted that intrinsic scales often correlate with dogmatism and social desirability. Batson introduced the Quest orientation to capture honest existential questioning, openness to change, and tolerance for religious doubt. Genia incorporated these insights by designing the SEI-R to measure strong intrinsic commitment (Spiritual Support) while independently measuring an open, quest-like tolerance for uncertainty and ideological diversity (Spiritual Openness).

Psychodynamic and Object Relations Formulations

From an object relations perspective (e.g., Ana-María Rizzuto, 1979), mature spiritual experience mirrors a healthy, internalized maternal/paternal representation characterized by basic trust, benevolent protection, and emotional safety rather than paranoid dread or punitive control. The Spiritual Support dimension operationalizes this mature internal God-representation as an experience of unconditional love, forgiveness, and emotional fortitude, which liberates the individual from defensive dogmatic splitting.

Validity

Extensive empirical studies have validated the construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity of the SEI-R across diverse collegiate, adult, and clinical populations.

Construct and Factorial Validity

During the reformulation of the instrument, Genia (1997) conducted exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to verify that the revision successfully eliminated the cross-loadings and doctrinal ambiguities present in the original 1991 scale. The two-factor model demonstrated exceptional stability across samples, confirming that Spiritual Support and Spiritual Openness operate as distinct, measurable dimensions of spiritual life that do not systematically suppress one another.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been established through predictable associations with established psychometric scales:

• Intrinsic Religiosity: The Spiritual Support subscale correlates strongly and positively (typically r = .70 to .85) with measures of intrinsic religiosity, such as the Allport-Ross Intrinsic Scale and Gorsuch and McPherson’s Intrinsic Revised Scale, confirming its sensitivity to internalized spiritual devotion.
• Quest and Epistemic Openness: The Spiritual Openness subscale correlates positively with Batson’s Quest Scale and measures of intellectual flexibility, validating its capacity to assess religious open-mindedness and epistemic humility.
• Well-Being and Meaning: Spiritual Support shows consistent, statistically significant positive correlations with psychological well-being, the Purpose in Life Test (Crumbaugh & Maholick), and self-esteem scales, underscoring the protective, resilience-enhancing nature of transcendent support.

Discriminant and Criterion Validity

The SEI-R demonstrates robust discriminant validity against ideological rigidity and defensive psychological functioning:

• Dogmatism and Fundamentalism: The Spiritual Openness subscale exhibits significant negative correlations (typically r = -.45 to -.65) with measures of dogmatism (such as the Rokeach Dogmatism Scale) and religious fundamentalism (such as the Altemeyer and Hunsberger Religious Fundamentalism Scale).
• Independence of Subscales: In general adult populations, Spiritual Support and Spiritual Openness show weak or near-zero intercorrelations, indicating that spiritual devotion does not inherently necessitate either extreme dogmatism or extreme relativism. This independence enables the empirical classification of respondents into distinct spiritual typologies (e.g., Dogmatic/Committed, Mature/Integrated, Uncommitted/Open, and Disengaged).
• Social Desirability: The items demonstrate low susceptibility to social desirability bias (e.g., Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale), showing that high scores on Openness or Support reflect authentic personal attitudes rather than impression management.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the SEI-R has been repeatedly confirmed through assessments of internal consistency and temporal stability.

Internal Consistency

In the initial normative and revision samples (Genia, 1997), the 13-item Spiritual Support subscale demonstrated exceptional internal consistency, yielding a Cronbach’s coefficient alpha of .95. Subsequent studies in independent clinical and community cohorts have consistently yielded alpha coefficients ranging from .89 to .94, indicating high item homogeneity and minimal measurement error.

The 10-item Spiritual Openness subscale, which measures a more heterogeneous and nuanced construct involving cognitive style and interfaith tolerance, demonstrated a Cronbach’s alpha of .72 in Genia’s (1997) validation study. Across independent investigations, internal consistency estimates for Spiritual Openness typically range between .70 and .80. Given the broad cognitive, social, and developmental facets tapped by openness, these values satisfy standard psychometric thresholds for research and clinical screening instruments.

Test-Retest Reliability

Studies evaluating temporal stability over test-retest intervals ranging from four to eight weeks have yielded stability coefficients exceeding r = .85 for Spiritual Support and r = .74 for Spiritual Openness. These findings indicate that while spiritual support remains highly stable across time, spiritual openness displays sufficient stability to qualify as a developmental trait while remaining open to modification following major life transitions, experiential education, or therapeutic interventions.

Factor Analysis

The psychometric development of the SEI-R involved rigorous factor analytic procedures designed to refine the structural integrity of the instrument from its initial 38-item version.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In the original instrument (Genia, 1991), exploratory factor analysis with orthogonal (Varimax) rotation yielded two primary factors, but several items exhibited high cross-loadings (> .35 on both factors) or loaded inconsistently across samples. In the 1997 revision, Genia eliminated 15 problematic items based on factor-loading purity, conceptual redundancy, and doctrinal bias.

The resulting 23-item instrument was subjected to Principal Axis Factoring and Maximum Likelihood extraction with both Varimax (orthogonal) and Promax/Oblimin (oblique) rotations. The analysis unambiguously supported a robust two-factor solution based on Kaiser’s eigenvalue criterion (> 1.0) and scree plot examination:

• Factor 1: Spiritual Support. Accounted for the largest proportion of total variance (typically between 35% and 42%). All 13 items demonstrated substantial primary factor loadings ranging from .62 to .86, with negligible secondary cross-loadings (< .25).
• Factor 2: Spiritual Openness. Accounted for an additional 9% to 14% of the total variance. The 10 retained items demonstrated solid factor loadings ranging from .38 to .71 on this dimension.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses examining the structural validity of the SEI-R have evaluated one-factor, two-factor orthogonal, and two-factor oblique models. Goodness-of-fit indices consistently confirm that the two-factor model provides superior fit to the observed data compared to a unidimensional model:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values consistently meet or exceed .91 – .94.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Values typically range between .048 and .065, demonstrating acceptable to good model fit.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Values generally remain below .060.

The moderate-to-low correlation between the two latent factors (frequently estimated between r = -.08 and r = .15 depending on the religious heterogeneity of the sample) provides definitive psychometric justification for treating Spiritual Support and Spiritual Openness as separate subscales rather than aggregating them into a single global composite score.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Spiritual Experience Index – Revised (SEI-R) is a self-administered questionnaire designed for standardized administration in research, counseling, and psychological evaluation settings.

• Instrument Name: Spiritual Experience Index – Revised (SEI-R)
• Author: Dr. Vicky Genia (1997)
• Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or computerized self-report inventory
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (typically ages 16 and older) across diverse religious, spiritual, or secular backgrounds
• Total Item Count: 23 items
• Subscales:
  • Spiritual Support Subscale: 13 items (Items 1 through 13 of the general scale)
  • Spiritual Openness Subscale: 10 items (Items 1 through 10 of the Openness subscale)
• Response Scale: 6-point Likert-type response format:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 4 = Somewhat Agree
  • 5 = Agree
  • 6 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Reverse Scoring: On the Spiritual Openness subscale, items 1, 3, 7, and 10 are negatively worded and must be reverse-scored prior to analysis (i.e., 1 becomes 6, 2 becomes 5, 3 becomes 4, 4 becomes 3, 5 becomes 2, 6 becomes 1).
  • Subscale Calculation: Each subscale is scored separately. Scores can be expressed as a continuous sum or continuous item mean (ranging from 1.00 to 6.00). Spiritual Support scores range from 13 to 78; Spiritual Openness scores range from 10 to 60.
  • Typological Classification: Researchers frequently perform median splits on both subscales to classify participants into four distinct quadrants: Spiritual/Mature (High Support, High Openness), Dogmatic/Traditional (High Support, Low Openness), Secular/Inquiring (Low Support, High Openness), and Disengaged/Alienated (Low Support, Low Openness).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Spiritual Experience Index – Revised was published in 1997 in the peer-reviewed journal Review of Religious Research (Genia, 1997). In accordance with academic dissemination standards, the instrument was made available for scholarly research, educational purposes, and non-commercial clinical use.

The instrument is also compiled in official measurement handbooks, notably appearing on page 8 of Self Report Measures for Love and Compassion Research: Spiritual Experience & Religiosity, published by the Fetzer Institute (1999/2012). Researchers and clinical professionals may use the scale without purchasing licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution and bibliographic citation are given to Dr. Vicky Genia. Commercial adaptation, inclusion in fee-for-service software platforms, or redistribution for profit requires prior permission from the author or the copyright holders.

References

• Allport, G. W., & Ross, J. M. (1967). Personal religious orientation and prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5(4), 432–443. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0021212
• Batson, C. D., & Schoenrade, P. A. (1991). Measuring religion as quest: 1. Validity concerns. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 30(4), 416–429. https://doi.org/10.2307/1387299
• Fetzer Institute. (1999). Multidimensional measurement of religiousness/spirituality for use in health research: A report of the John E. Fetzer Institute/National Institute on Aging Working Group. John E. Fetzer Institute. https://fetzer.org/
• Fowler, J. W. (1981). Stages of faith: The psychology of human development and the quest for meaning. Harper & Row.
• Genia, V. (1991). The Spiritual Experience Index: A measure of spiritual maturity. Journal of Religion and Health, 30(4), 337–347. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00986741
• Genia, V. (1997). The Spiritual Experience Index: Revision and reformulation. Review of Religious Research, 38(4), 344–361. https://doi.org/10.2307/3512215
• Rizzuto, A.-M. (1979). The birth of the living God: A psychoanalytic study. University of Chicago Press.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)