Measuring Religious and Spiritual Competence Across Helping Professions: Previous Efforts and Future Directions

Emerging research has suggested that the integration of clients' religion/spirituality (RS) in mental and behavioral health treatment has the potential to improve outcomes. Historically, content related to clients' religious/spiritual beliefs and practices has not been included in training programs across helping professions, yet many professional organizations include standing ethical mandates that clinical practitioners ethically, effectively, and competently assess and attend to this area of clients' lives as it relates to practice. Given these ethical mandates to include clients' RS in treatment, and with few helping professionals having received training in this area, it is critical that helping professions become aware of current practitioners' levels of competence in this area. However, few efforts have been made to develop and standardize reliable and valid instruments to measure helping professions' competence as it relates to RS. This article provides an overview of previous efforts to evaluate and measure RS competence in counseling, psychology, psychiatry, marriage and family therapy, social work, and pastoral counseling. Implications regarding current methods of measuring RS competence are included, with recommendations for future efforts to evaluate RS competence among helping professions.