Vasi Van Deventer

Spiritual intelligence in a multicultural context Vasi Van Deventer

This study investigates the nature of spiritual intelligence and its link to ethnic identity, and gauges the difference across the main ethnic groups in Mauritius: Hindu-Mauritians, Creole-Mauritians, and Muslim-Mauritians. The authors proposed a new scale, the Multicultural Spiritual Intelligence Scale (MSIS), using the following six dimensions: self-awareness, transcendental awareness, levels of consciousness, quest for meaning, sensitivity, and resilience. The MSIS's construct validity was tested with other similar scales. The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR) (Paulhus, 1991) was also included to check for socially desirable responses and MSIS's divergent validity. A Welch ANOVA revealed a statistical difference in spiritual intelligence among the ethnic groups: Welch's F (2, 639.98) = 3.923. Spearman's rank order correlation revealed that ethnic identification was connected to spiritual intelligence: rs (98) = 0.52, p