A defense of the Spiritual Emergency Scale: emergency vs. emergence

Abstract

In this article, we propose that the Spiritual Emergency Scale (SES) was not designed to measure a state of spiritual emergence, but measures exactly what the title suggests; namely spiritual emergency. On the one hand, SES scores indicate states of spiritual emergency as is most clearly indicated by the references to emergency in the form of keywords, terms, and phrases embedded in SES items. On the other hand, to infer that ‘emergence’ is ongoing, or is a fait accompli, simply on the basis of SES item responses, would be misleading. The authors also contrast the single-factor solution of spiritual emergency with two different four-factor solutions.