Spirituality and Motivation of College Students

The present study is one kind of exploratory study where it is intended to find the role of spirituality in motivation among college students. It is explored in the current study by statistical measure Pearson rho. Positive and highly significant correlation is found between spirituality and motivation of college students. Therefore it may be concluded that students who are spiritual may be more motivated than non spiritual. And on the other hand students who are motivated could be more spiritual than students with low motivation.

Why do people do what they do? It can be either as the result of inborn (hunger, thirst, sleep and sex) or acquired motives which drives human behavior. So what is this motive and how it contributes to human behaviour? On one hand, inborn motives are physiological and on the other hand acquired are psycho-social in nature. Therefore, it can be said that inborn motives are governed by biological system and acquired are governed by learning from the environment. Keeping in view of these aspects, the present study is attempted to find the role of spirituality in human motivation. Motivation are of two categories; intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic is that motivation which gives mostly internal satisfaction without having any desire of external awards. On the other hand extrinsic is driven by external rewards. In the current study it is attempted to assess the role of spirituality in motivation among college students. It is expected in the present study that spirituality may contribute in intrinsic motivation. One of the studies conducted by Byrd, Hageman and Isle (2007) and it was evolved that intrinsic religiousness could not only be the lone predictor in satisfaction, purpose and self-efficacy of life but also in the subjective well being of the individual. In view of career decision making among people it was found that people having strong spiritual bond with almighty and religiousness may just enhance their ability to make decision but also ready to explore different career options (Duffya and Blustein, 2005). Morality usually comes in mind when someone talks about religiosity and spirituality. Morality could be a significant factor in motivation in the process of implanting ethical principles. There was revealed in a study on medical students, that sensitivity towards morality may contribute a mediator role between moral and reasoning motivation (Morton et al. 2006). Very common issue in the process of examination in schools and colleges is cheating. Why is this? Though there are many rules and regulations to control it even if it is found difficult to control. Can be there any mean to reduce it internally among students. It can be explored in view of spirituality or religiosity. Just it has been discussed above that sensitivity towards morality can mediates reasoning motivation. So the role of spirituality may contribute in it. With reference to cheating behavior, a study found that religiosity of the students has reduced the cheating behavior in exams (Rettinger and Jordan, 2005). It is strong belief of the author that spirituality cannot remain free from religiosity entirely. There are some ways or others where religiosity and spirituality overlaps with each other. Therefore studies related to religiosity are also discussed in the current study. The elements related to the understanding of almighty and motivation excelled predictive variance over each other with respect to self-reported religious behavior (Schaefer and Gorsuch, 1992). How this religious motivation can help to elders? Evidence concerning to elderly people has clarified that religious motivation is related to not only personal adjustment but also other aspects of their lives (O'Connora and Valleran, 1990). There is evidence which shows that how religiosity and spirituality can play a role in human behavior. There was found that religious based activities have motivated the voluntary participation among population for the physical activities (Stevyn et al., 2003).
However there could be also other aspects related spirituality, religiosity and motivation among people but those may not be as close to as the present study is intended. Therefore the current study is specifically aimed to know the role of spirituality in motivation among college students. It was designed in such a way so that the gaps and conflicts among different studies pertaining to spirituality, religiosity and motivation could be filled up to some extent. However there was not found many studies pertaining to objective of the current study but some of partially concerned studies have given a rough idea to begin. Therefore it may be said that the current study is exploratory in itself.

Participants
There were 40 college students from the different streams. Theses participants are a group of class which was selected conveniently. There were 25 male and 15 female participants among them. The age range was between 19 to 21 years.

Materials and Procedure
To measure the spirituality and motivation two different tools were administered. Global Motivation Scale (GMS-28) by Guay, Mageau, and Vallerand (2003) was used to assess three types of intrinsic, extrinsic motivation and a motivation. There are 4 items per subscale and thus contained a total of 28 items. Each item represents a possible reason for doing things in general. Items are scored on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (does not correspond at all) to 7 (corresponds completely). The GMS has demonstrated high levels of construct and concurrent validity as well as internal consistency. In the present study, Cronbach's alphas for the six subscales ranged from .69 to .93. Spirituality Assessment Scale by Howden (1992), was used to measure spirituality of college students. There are four domains in this scale Purpose and Meaning in Life, Innerness or Inner Resources, Unifying Interconnectedness and Transcendence. The SAS has high internal consistency (alpha=0.9164).

Procedure
• To conduct the present study a booklet of both questionnaires was compiled. Thereafter all instructions as per the manual of the questionnaires were given. After that participants were asked to fill the statements honestly. • To find the correlation, Pearson rho was applied. It was done with the help of SPSS.

RESULTS
According to the procedure, tools were administered on participants and scored as per the manual instructions. It was intended to assess the spirituality and motivation of the participants through the standardized tests. Thereafter these data were analyzed with the help of SPSS. To find the relationship between spirituality and motivation in the current study the Pearson rho is applied. Result of this analysis is summarized in the table no 1 in appendix. Results of the current study show the Person rho value as 0.594 which is significant at 0.001 levels. This value indicates that there is positive and strong correlation between spirituality and motivation. In other words it can be said that present study found the evidence which claim a positive relationship between spirituality and motivation among students. Another part of the table related to descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation shows that there are 25 male students whose mean is 128.76 and Sd. is 19.88. There are 15 female participants in the current study whose mean and Sd. is 141.2000 and 25.73 respectively.

DISCUSSION
There is a big bank of studies concerning to spirituality and other aspects but few studies are conducted on the spirituality and motivation of college students. Thus author had little evidence to infer something in this regard. Therefore it is one kind of exploratory research. There are some studies pertaining to religiosity and above all intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity which seems to near to the current study. These and other such studies have prompted author to conduct current study. So having this notion in mind the objective of the present study is framed as: To find the role of spirituality in motivation among college students. This is conducted by measuring spirituality and motivation of the college students with the help of two questionnaires (Spirituality and Motivation scale). Data collected from students were fed in the SPSS and Spearman's rho was computed. The value of rho (0.594) is found significant at 0.001 levels. Which shows that there can be some role of spirituality in the motivation of the student? Having found the positive correlation between spirituality and motivation, it may be inferred that spiritual students have more probabilities to be highly motivated than non spirituals. In other words highly motivated students can be more spiritual as well. What could be the reason of this finding? Author estimates that first could be gender. It is to be noted that in the present study despite having more male students (25) than female students (15), the mean value of female is found more (141.20) than male students (128.76). In other words female students have high means and SD than male students. So this may be one of the factors. Other source could be participation in religious based activities (Stevyn et al., 2003) which may increase the motivation of the students. As one knows that spirituality also emphasizes on the meaning of life so it may be that college students involved in the current study might have found their current academic endeavor as more meaningful to them. This could have caused their positive correlation with spirituality. In reverse motivation drives the human behaviour and spirituality attempts to find the meaning in that behaviour which may lead both of them to the end positive correlation. Internal satisfaction from intrinsic motivation might involve students in spiritual activities. So this may be another reason for positive correlation between spirituality and motivation.
This may be concluded from the findings that students who are spiritual may be more motivated than non spiritual. On the other hand students who are motivated may be more spiritual than not motivated students. Schaefer, C. A., & Gorsuch, R. L. (1992). Dimensionality of religion: Belief and motivation as predictors of behavior. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 11(3), 244-254. Stevyn, L. M., Curt, L. L., Brian, B., & Lesa, S. (2003). An investigation of the relation between religion and exercise motivation.