Supporting undergraduate spirituality: College-related factors Evangelical Christian students perceive as affecting their working through spiritual struggle while attending a public university.

摘要

Undergraduate experiences of spiritual struggle on campus are common and indeed necessary for personal spiritual development and holistic maturity, but they are often unseen or misunderstood by universities, leading to a lack of their support and even detrimental effects on the students; experiencing that struggle. The purpose of this study is to understand Evangelical Christian undergraduates' descriptions of factors that contribute to their spiritual struggle and the resources they accessed to work through that struggle. Understanding what these students see as supportive resources, relationships, and experiences available to help them work through spiritual struggle can offer additional insights to public colleges and universities they can apply to support students' spiritual and holistic development. Thirty-nine interviews were conducted with twenty undergraduates in a qualitative study at a major Midwestern university. While students' descriptions of the factors that contributed to their spiritual struggles and the resources they accessed to work through those struggles remained consistent with previous literature descriptions, this study extends the research on undergraduate spiritual struggle by focusing on Evangelical Christian undergraduates; further classifying students' spiritual struggle descriptions by adopting Parks' (2000) spiritual development framework; and introducing a separating-integrating continuum to describe students' views of their campus and how these may influence the kinds of spiritual struggles they encounter and the resources they will access to work through that struggle. By providing richer descriptions of Evangelical undergraduate spiritual struggles, public universities will be more aware and better prepared to support these students as they work through their spiritual struggle experiences.