Open AccessPositive Psychology’s Character Strengths in Addiction-Spirituality Research: A Qualitative Systematic Literature Review
Author(s) -
Sahaya G. Selvam
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
the qualitative report
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2160-3715
DOI - 10.46743/2160-3715/2015.2116
Subject(s) - psychology , spirituality , addiction , systematic review , humility , mainstream , qualitative research , kindness , social psychology , set (abstract data type) , forgiveness , psychotherapist , sociology , medline , social science , medicine , philosophy , alternative medicine , theology , pathology , neuroscience , political science , computer science , law , programming language
There is an increasing interest in the scientific study of the association between spirituality and recovery from addiction. While most of these studies have provided evidence for a possible relationship, others have explored the underlying mechanisms and meditators in the relationship. However, generally, many studies and reviews have not approached the issue within a specific theoretical framework of mainstream psychology. In an attempt to fill this gap, the review being reported here undertook a Qualitative Systematic Literature Review (QSLR) of addiction-spirituality literature. QSLR is an orderly manner of searching for academic literature, selecting relevant literature following a set of inclusion/exclusion criteria, qualitatively analysing the selected literature, and reporting the findings in such a way as to generate a set of hypotheses. QSLR focusses on literary data, rather than on numerical data as the tradition Systematic Literature Review and Meta-analysis do. Working within the framework of positive psychology, the present review attempted to identify the character strengths relevant to addiction and recovery by carrying out a QSLR on 53 selected peer-reviewed articles. Among the 24 character strengths, the following emerged as salient: wisdom, integrity, vitality, humility, forgiveness, kindness, love, hope and spirituality. On this basis, a hypothetical conclusion is suggested.