Spirituality/religiousity measurement and health in Brazil: a systematic review

Spirituality/religiousness has been regarded as an important dimension for health studies and services. The present study consists of a systematic review on health and spirituality/religiousness, specifically, instruments for its measurement. In order to do so, we searched for papers using the keywords scales spirituality religiousness and scales spirituality religiousness and health in CAPES, DOAJ, Lilacs, Pubmed, Scielo and Web of Science, from 2000 to 2017. The search returned 500 studies, from which 35 were selected, considering their originality, availability, language (English or Portuguese), and description of scales for measuring spirituality/religiousness and adapted for the Brazilian culture. From such papers, 16 instruments were identified; the instruments with most studies were the WHOQOL-100 (as well as its reduced version and the SRPB module), the Spiritual Well-Being Scale and the RCOPE scale. We conclude that studies on this field are scarce, for, although many instruments are described, the continuity of their validation is poor.