A Scale of Authenticity as a Secular Measurement of Spirituality

Abstract

Abstract Spirituality in higher education has received increasing attention in the last two decades, but the association of spirituality with religiousness creates challenges. As an alternative approach to spirituality, this study proposes a scale to measure the closely related concept of students’ authenticity. Using a large-scale, longitudinal dataset, the results provide strong support for the factor structure, internal reliability, and validity of an overall authenticity measure and five subscales that capture different dimensions of authenticity.