Spiritual Understanding, Self-Actualization, and Quality of Education

Seyed Rahmatollah MOUSAVIMOGHADAM¹, Narges SOLTANIAN², Maryam FARHADBEIGI², Safoura MOHAMADPOUR^3*, Maasoumeh MORADI²

¹Department of Islamic Studies, Faculty of Medicine, Ilam University of Medical Sciences, Ilam, Iran,

²Department of Psychology, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Science Ilam, Iran,

³ Psychosocial Injuries Research Centre, Ilam University of Medical Sciences, Ilam, Iran.

* Corresponding Author

Email: safoura.mohamadpour @ yahoo.com

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Spiritual intelligence is the ability to utilize and inculcate sources, spiritual values and qualities, self-actualization, movement, and the unceasing tendency towards internal unity and integrity. Method: The method of this research was descriptive-analytic and correlational. The statistical population consisted of all students who studied in 2015 at Ilam University, Faculty of Literature and Humanities (200 students from the undergraduate degree). Multi-stage cluster random sampling was used. The data collection tools were Ahwaz self-actualization questionnaires, King's spiritual understanding, and a researcher-made test of the quality of education. Data were analyzed using SPSS software, Pearson correlation test, and regression. Results: The results showed that self-esteem and educational quality have a positive correlation with spiritual perception, and the results of regression also showed that these two variables are good predictors of spiritual understanding. Conclusion: The results indicated that self-efficacy variables and quality of education have a decisive role in the spiritual understanding of students.

Keywords: Spiritual Understanding, Self-Actualization, Quality of Education, Student.

INTRODUCTION

Higher education (HE) is at the core of every economic unit. It is the engine that generates new workers, new business ideas and new policy developers. According to Mark Brey (2007), universities “with question and teaching, contribute to the production of science and innovation in research.” We are seeing rapid growth and change in higher education (Chaushi and Dika, 2013 ). At the end of the last decade, this type of integration between inner and outer life has emerged and one of the most important proposed areas of such integration has been the educational system. Login concepts such as morality, truth, faith in God or a higher power, honesty, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, and passed, meaning savings in labor, altruism, self-actualization, etc. suggest the emergence of a new paradigm (spirituality). Spiritual intelligence is one of those concepts that has been raised and developed in light of the global interest of psychologists in the field of religion and spirituality (Mousavimoghadam et al., 2016a). Amram (2007) suggested that spiritual intelligence, the ability to apply resources, values, and spiritual quality, is such that to daily function and comfort (psychological and physical) to improve (Amram, 2007). Self-actualization is the basic orientation to realize and bring objectivity to their potential (Maddi, 1998). Also, self-actualization is an uninterrupted moving trend towards unity and its internal integration. An effort to achieve self-actualization is with character growth in circulation (Mousavimoghadam et al., 2016a). On the other hand, the progress of Societies depends on the level of education, qualitative, and quantitative expansion of the education system particularly the higher education system (Mousavimoghadam et al., 2016b). Barzanouni (2000) spirituality is an innate human need and is considered key to the survival of communities and would fill the vacuum of human existence. Maslow (1969) in the most recent expression of his thoughts in connection with the hierarchy of needs, proposed self-transcendence or in other words a spiritual being, as a preparatory stage, to achieve self-actualization (Tavan et al., 2015). Emami et al. (2014) analyzed the effect of spiritual intelligence, moral intelligence, self-actualization, and life satisfaction, and the results showed that the effect of moral intelligence, self-actualization, and life satisfaction is significant. The results of Mousavimoghadam et al (2015) showed higher education, solidarity, and spiritual health had a significant positive effect; male students rated the quality of education as excellent. There were significant differences between all of the students in spiritual health. Also, the results of simple linear regression analysis showed that predicting quality of education as the highest level of education in students based on their spiritual health is justified. (Mousavimoghadam et al., 2015).

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between spiritual understanding, self-actualization, and the quality of education at the University of Ilam.

METHOD

The methodology of the present research was descriptive and of the correlational type, and included 2500 undergraduate students from the Faculty of Literature, University of Ilam. About 8 percent of students (200 people) were selected according to the farmers and Morgan random cluster sampling. For sampling, the students were divided into 12 clusters based on the field of study and each of these clusters were divided to smaller clusters based on the year of entering to the University (48 clusters) and after recording all the clusters in a table, 7 clusters were randomly selected for sampling. Necessary conditions to participate in the study included: A. Being volunteer to participate in research, B. Belonging to the same cluster for sampling, C. Teacher’s satisfaction to enter the classroom to perform questionnaires. After the objectives of the research and confidentiality of the questionnaire information were fully explained to the volunteers, the research questionnaires were provided to the participants in order to complete them in a group environment. The research tools included the Scale of King's spiritual understanding: The Scale of King was built in 2007 and consists of 24 items with 4 subscales including critical thinking, personal meaning of product development, transcendental consciousness, and Spread awareness. A 5-point Likert scoring was used and scores ranged between 0 to 90. High scores indicate high spiritual understanding or a person's capacity. The validity of this scale was determined using several questionnaires including Scale of transpersonal interpretation, mysticism and religiosity scale, Scale of internal and external measures, and its correlation with the scales were respectively 0/67, 0/63 and 0/58. The reliability of spiritual understanding was measured using test-retest, and its alpha coefficient was 0/95. Alpha coefficient subscales for critical thinking, personal meaning of product development, transcendental consciousness, and e Spread awareness were respectively 0.88, 0.87, 0.89, and 0.94 (King, 2008). Ahvaz self-actualization questionnaire has 25 items which was designed by Esmaeilkhani et al. (2001) was built in Ahvaz (Esmaeilkhani et al., 2001). The scores of each item were zero (never), 1 (rarely), 2 (sometimes) and 3 (often), and therefore, the range of scores varied from 0 to 75. The reliability of this questionnaire with test-retest was equal to 0.90, and Cronbach's alpha was reported to be 0.92. The validity of this questionnaire was calculated by correlation with the questionnaire of self-concept, Beck Depression Inventory, and anxiety questionnaire ANQ and the coefficients obtained were respectively equal to 0.66, -0.70 and -0.77 (Musavimoghadam et al., 2015). The 5-point Likert type questionnaire of quality of education was prepared by the authors. It included 17 questions, 2 of the questions were eliminated, and with the approval of three experts validity and content were confirmed. The validity of this questionnaire was confirmed using Cronbach's alpha (0.90).

Data analyses were performed using SPSS. The data were expressed as mean and standard deviation. The correlation and regression analyses were carried out.

RESULTS

The results of this study are shown in tables 1 and 2. According to the results of Table 1, it can be said that the mean ± standard deviation of spiritual perception, Self-actualization, and quality of education were 45.8 ±17.81, 51.81 ±11.53, and 33.62 ± 6.97, respectively (Table 1).

Table 1: Mean and standard deviation spiritual understanding, self-actualization and quality of education and the correlation coefficient between them

Students had an average age of 25.28 with a standard deviation of 3.57. 120 students were female and 80 individuals (40 percent) were male. The results of the stepwise regression analysis showed that firstly self-actualization had a correlation with spiritual understanding. Secondly, the quality of education was also significant. Generally, these variables in two stages of regression explained 0/10 of variance of spiritual understanding (Table 2).

Table 2: summarizes the results of to stepwise multiple regression

DISCUSSION

The present study investigated the relationship between spiritual understanding, self-actualization and the quality of education in students in the University of Ilam, results of which showed that Spiritual understanding is significantly and positively associated with self-actualization and educational quality with spiritual understanding. The results were consistent with the findings of Emami et al. (2014), and Mousavimoghadam et al. (2015). To explain, humanists believe that self-contained individuals have moments of spiritual highness and pleasure in which they forget about themselves and the material world. (Esmaeilkhani et al., 2001). The spiritual dimension of human excellence can be achieved by people in this way the scope of the self, biological, and psychological values are different (Musavimoghadam et al., 2015). Also, education can be seen as a community activity and its goals and methods depend on the nature of the community in which it operates. Therefore, education is sensitive to time, place, and conditions. This is because it is constantly changing and adapting to new demands  (Eze, 2009). Promoting spiritual understanding in prosperity and higher education requires a systematic approach and preparing the ground and favorable structural contexts, appropriate incentive mechanisms which in the context of spontaneous activity, the professional associations, professional bodies universities, and research centers are developed. So, to grow and develop prosperity and quality of education, high spiritual understanding is necessary.   

CONCLUSION

For the growth and development of self-actualization and the quality of education, having a high spiritual understanding is essential. By managing the proper training, the selection of appropriate methods of teaching, teaching and evaluation of students rather than assessing the memories of their academic guidance, occupational, physical, moral, intellectual and psychological and spiritual power of the quality of education and self-actualization in scientific centers management are raised.

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