Daily Fluctuations in Spirituality
SoulPulse is an ongoing research study that combines smartphones and survey methodology to learn
how people experience spirituality on a moment-by-moment basis. Participants sign-up at SoulPulse.org
(and we invite you to be one), and after an intake survey, they receive two short surveys a day for 14
days. These daily surveys are texted to them on their smartphones, and they answer questions about
what they are experiencing at that moment in regards to their spirituality, circumstances, health, and
emotions. At the end of two weeks, participants receive an interactive report that plots their spiritual
experiences during the study. To date, over 1,700 people have signed up for SoulPulse, and the study
will run for at least three more years. It is funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation as
well as private donors.
This is the first report on findings from SoulPulse. It is based on the first 1,500 participants. This report
focuses on one of the central measures in the study: spiritual awareness. In the daily surveys,
participants are asked to rate themselves on the statement “I am aware of God at this moment”, with
responses ranging from “not at all” to “very much.” (Participants who don’t believe in God are
instructed to call to mind whatever they view as holy or sacred). This report describes day-to-day
fluctuations in spiritual awareness.
Variation in Spiritual Awareness
We start with a simple plot of spiritual
awareness scores across all the daily surveys.
The study has generated 19,716 observations
of this variable, and it is scored from 1 “not
much” to 100 “very much.” Figure 1 plots a
histogram of these observations.
The striking feature of Figure 1 is just how
much variation there is across observations.
Sometimes people rated their spiritual
awareness at that moment as “1”, other times
“100”, and every point in-between. This
variation raises the interesting question of
why people’s spiritual awareness varies so much over time.
There are some distinct patterns in this variation. The median score is “70,” suggesting that this
predominately (90%) Christian sample experience relatively high levels of spiritual awareness day in and
day out. Also, many observations were clustered at the ends of the scale, with almost 20% of the
observations scoring 95 or higher and 6% rating five or lower. This clustering suggests that for some
people, spiritual awareness can be an all-or-nothing nothing proposition. (The spike at “50” is a
measurement artifact that we corrected partway through the study).
To better understand how individual people vary in their spiritual awareness, we present data for three
separate participants. Each is a woman in her 50s, who is married, but they demonstrate very different
patterns of spiritual awareness.
Participant #904 is a white woman who lives
in California. She has a master’s degree. She’s
married and has five or more kids. She is a
Baptist, and she has no doubts that God
exists.
She averages high levels of spiritual
awareness, for half of her scores fall between
95 and 100. However, sometimes her scores
dip down to the midrange of the scale.
Participant #1200 is African-American woman
who lives in Florida. She is married, has two
children, neither of whom lives at home. She
earned an associate’s degree. She is a
Presbyterian, and she has no doubts that God
exists.
Her spiritual awareness varies widely. She’s
always somewhat spiritually aware but never
fully so. Her scores range from “26” to “86.”
Participant #1400 is a white woman who lives
in New England. She has two children. She has
a PhD. She identifies herself as Jewish. She
sometimes believes in God.
Her spiritual awareness scores are uniformly
low. All but one are at “4” or below, and that
one exception is only “9.” It’s possible that for
each survey she swiped the slider bar all the way to the left for this question—intending to register “not
much” each time.
Spiritual Awareness by Time
The day and time of each daily survey was
recorded, allowing us to examine how
spiritual awareness varies by time. It turns
out that spiritual awareness levels were
about the same for all seven days of the
week; however, they varied somewhat by
the time of day.
For the sample as a whole, spiritual
awareness was highest in the morning, and it
decreased steadily throughout the day until
its lowest point, in the evening.
Spiritual Awareness by Activity
In most surveys, the participants were asked
what they were doing when they received
the survey, and they could choose from
about two dozen activities. Here we look at
spiritual awareness levels associated with the
fourteen most commonly done activities.
Spiritual awareness did not significantly vary
by seven of these activities: traveling, doing
housework, childcare, watching television,
using a computer (not at work), relaxing, or
eating. In contrast, awareness levels varied
significantly by seven other activities.
Participants were less spiritually aware when
they were resting or sleeping—recording scores 5 percentile points lower than when they were not
resting or sleeping. They were also less aware when they were using a computer at work or just being at
work. Participants were more spiritually aware when they were reading, preparing food, listening to
music, and, especially, praying.i
Spiritual Awareness by Companions
Another survey question asked participants if
they were with someone and, if so, who they
were with. For the most part, who the
participants were with had association with
their spiritual awareness levels. So, these
levels were about the same whether
participants were with their partner, parents,
friends, acquaintances, customers or bosses.
There were a couple of significant
associations. Participants reported lower
levels of spiritual awareness when they were
with strangers—about 7 percentile points
lower—than when they weren’t with
strangers. Spiritual awareness scores were also lower when they were with coworkers. Scores were
modestly higher when the participant was with their children.
Spiritual Awareness by Sleep
A final aspect of day-to-day life that we
examine for this report is sleep. We tested
the association of spiritual awareness with
both the quantity and quality of sleep.
Spiritual awareness had little association
with how much people slept, so someone
who slept 6 hours the night before had about
the same awareness as someone who had
slept 9 hours.
However, spiritual awareness had a
substantial awareness with self-reported
quality of sleep. Each morning, participants
were asked how well they had slept the night before, and those who slept well were much more
spiritually aware. There’s a near linear increase in spiritual awareness across levels of sleep quality such
that the participants who slept the best had spiritual awareness scores nearly 14 percentile points
higher than those who slept the worst.
i
As a methodological qualification: The analyses in this report are simple associations between observations. As
such, they do not distinguish between-person variation from within-person variation. For example, the finding
about prayer could mean that the type of people who pray are more spiritually aware, that prayer makes people
more spirituality aware, or, perhaps most likely, both.