Project Overview
Despite a growing need for spiritual care in the US, it is often under-served, inaccessible, or misunderstood, while almost no prior research in the fields of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW/HCI) has engaged with professional chaplains and spiritual care providers. This interdisciplinary study aims to develop a foundational understanding of how spiritual care may (or may not) be expanded into online spaces—especially focusing on anonymous, asynchronous, and text-based online communities.
This project involved three interdependent and complementary research phases: 1) Phase-1—mainly involved a qualitative approach through interviews with participants in the East and West Coasts, USA; 2) Phase-2—involves a national survey; and 3) Phase-3—involves co-design workshops with potential implementation teams.
Data and Data Collection Overview
Phase-1:
Empirical formative data collection was conducted with professional spiritual care stakeholders to understand their perspectives and ideations about online spiritual care communities (OSCCs), and the prospective roles of professional chaplains within them. Data for the study comprised semi-structured interviews followed by user testing sessions on Reddit with participants located across the USA.
The recruitment began by contacting people within the existing professional networks of the research team. Then the authors used snowball sampling and cold emailing to identify additional participants. Eligibility criteria included adults over 18 years of age with acquisition of professional training or credentialing in chaplaincy. Twenty-two participants were recruited for the interviews. Sixteen interview sessions were conducted in-person and the remaining six were conducted over Zoom. Data were collected over approximately four months in early 2024.
A definition of spiritual support in the context of online spaces from prior work was used during the first part of the interview session as a tool to ignite discussion on the essence of spiritual care. Additionally, a few identical questions that helped to track perspective shifts before and after the interview were included in the recruitment survey and the exit survey. The project used the grounded-theory methodology (GTM) to guide the data collection and analysis.
Interviews are recorded and then auto transcribed with Microsoft Word and manually double-checked and corrected against audio by the research team. All the interview transcripts were de-identified for sharing.
Selection and Organization of Shared Data
The data files shared here encompass the 22 de-identified interview transcripts and the responses to the intake and exit survey questionnaires. While the data for Phases 2 and 3 will be released as they are completed, the current version of the deposit contains only the data from Phase 1.
The documentation files shared consist of the informed consent script and the recruitment and exit survey questionnaires and the interview questionnaires used, as well as a Data Narrative and an administrative README file. |
