The research of The HealthCare Chaplaincy draws on theories from many fields to explore the relationship between religion and spirituality and physical and mental well-being. Our full-time research staff includes both psychologists and sociologists, and our collaborators include hospital chaplains, nurses, and physicians, as well as university-based faculty in anthropology, psychology, sociology, and medicine. By bringing together perspectives from multiple disciplines, we are better able to holistically examine human faith and deepen scholarly understanding of the interactions among religion and health, spiritual needs, the role of chaplaincy in the healthcare system, spiritual development across the lifespan, and palliative care.

Religion and Health
The relationship between religion and health is the overarching theme of all our research projects. In order to study broad questions about religion and health in the general population, the research department utilizes information from the General Social Survey and other widely respected databases, as well as our own web-based surveys. Recent projects include studies on spiritual struggles and psychopathology, prayer, images of God, and psychological well-being. The department is currently pursuing further research on the association between physical and mental health and specific beliefs about God, life after death, evil, and forgiveness, using multiple regression and structural equation models.

Palliative Care and Family Caregiving
> Palliative care is an important yet understudied part of the healthcare system that has long interested the researchers at The Chaplaincy. Related to our ongoing interest in palliative care is the role of family members as the primary caregiver to sick relatives. Often overlooked, family members are the most common caregivers to the medically ill and often suffer great stress as a result. As caregiving shifts from rehabilitative to palliative, personal, financial, and familial stress can grow exponentially. Family members, as the most invested members of the healthcare team and often the most involved on a daily basis, need special attention in making this transition. Understanding this, our current project examines the role of family caregivers in palliative care through an examination of the spiritual and emotional needs of daughters caring for mothers suffering from Alzheimer’s. Ethnographic interviews of daughter-caregivers were collected over a one-year period and reflect the fluctuating relationship between caregiver and patient, the role reversal of mother and daughter, and the effect of caregiving on daughters. Qualitative analyses will examine themes of spirituality, end-of-life care, and the effect of illness on the family unit.

Spiritual Care and the Role of the Chaplain in the Healthcare System
The research department has done and continues to do extensive research on the roles, functions, and activities of chaplains and the nature of the non-denominational spiritual care they provide to patients. Current projects include the development of tools to assess the spiritual needs of hospital patients, analysis of the relationships among patients’ spiritual and emotional needs, spiritual assessment and spiritual interventions among different patient populations, and the evaluation of the efficacy of pastoral care for patients and their families. Related research explores the attitude of staff about referring patients to chaplains for various problems. The department recently began a series of studies to evaluate clinical pastoral education (CPE) with respect to the development of clinical skills, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence. Our newest initiative is in a hospital setting, an experimental study of the effectiveness of a chaplain intervention to increase physicians’ attention to spirituality and end-of-life issues among patients.

Spirituality Across the Lifespan
Recently, a new direction in our research has emerged: the development of religiosity and spirituality across the lifespan. Our research in this area began with a study on the deepening of religious faith as adults age, and an upcoming project will focus on young adult spirituality. This project will combine quantitative and qualitative methodologies to explore identity formation, spiritual growth, and life purpose in a diverse college population. Examining how faith contributes to the goal of becoming a more mature, sensitive, and well-rounded individual, this project will unveil the links between healthy psychological development and the sequential maturation of spiritual development.

ChaplaincyCounts Database Project
The HealthCare Chaplaincy has developed advanced patient data-collection technology for its hospital-based chaplains. With this technology, Chaplaincy clinicians can now use desktop and hand-held computers to enter a variety of patient data such as referral source (e.g., nurse, doctor, local clergy), visitation frequency and length, patient affect, and clinical intervention. Because this is a web-based system, our chaplains, faculty, and research staff can access the data from any computer with an internet connection.

The HealthCare Chaplaincy has also given hospital administrators access to the same privacy-protected content over the Internet. These data provide valuable information for on-site administrators and our clinical and research staff. They help administrators get a better sense of the contributions that Chaplaincy clinicians make to patients and their loved ones, and to the hospital’s own staff. This information also helps chaplains see which departments most need pastoral care services and what types of pastoral intervention are most frequently requested. Finally, ChaplaincyCounts gives our researchers a new way to explore spiritual needs in a hospital setting.

Spiritual Needs Surveys
Instruments to measure the spiritual needs of patients and family members were originally developed by the Research Department as part of a multi-year project supported by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. A series of studies using these instruments are designed to determine what the spiritual needs of patients are and how they are being met. The findings from these studies will allow us to better address the spiritual needs of hospitalized patients and their family members, and help certified, multifaith healthcare chaplains throughout North America empirically demonstrate the value of informed spiritual care to their employers.

As the American healthcare system becomes increasingly streamlined and bottom-line-driven, the need has only increased for chaplains to quantify the potentially "hidden" benefits of professional multifaith pastoral care. Without this evidence, it is difficult to demonstrate the many ways chaplains add value to their hospital institutions, such as by increasing admissions and referrals.