Hint of the Month and News Update - November, 2003
 
November 2003 Hint
Spiritual Beliefs in a Multicultural Society

The ten items in the Spiritual Beliefs Category of each of the Prepare-Enrich materials are designed to assess the extent to which the person answering the questions has a commitment to spiritual beliefs and sees these beliefs as having an important consequence for their relationship.  The questions are not intended to assess commitment to a specific religion or religious denomination. High individual scores indicate that the person is  strongly committed to their spiritual beliefs and that these beliefs have an important connection to their relationship.  

High couple agreement in the Spiritual Beliefs Category indicates that they share a commitment to these beliefs in general.  However, they might still have a commitment to different specific forms of belief.  For example, this would be the case for a couple in which one person is a Roman Catholic and the other is a Muslim.  When you are working with couples from differing cultures you will need to look out for this issue.  Getting them to expand on and discuss what they had in mind when they answered the Spiritual Beliefs items will help them to explore these issues in more depth.

The original items were designed to be appropriate mainly for Christian and Jewish believers and non-believers.  You may have noticed that Prepare, Prepare-MC, Enrich and Mate all use items that refer to church or synagogue (item 90).  However, we recognise that it is possible that Muslim, Buddhist and other persons may take the materials.  In Prepare-CC (the newest of the inventories) we have changed the wording of item 90 to refer to "place of worship" to make the question more widely applicable.  This change will be made in the other materials as we print new item booklets in the future.

This minor change will make the materials more accessible to a wider range of people without losing the usefulness and value of the Spiritual Beliefs Orientation category.  

News Update:  

    End of year closedown for the Prepare-Enrich office takes place over the period 
    December 18 to January 4. 

    The last day for processing in 2003 is Wednesday December 17 and the office reopens in 2004 on Monday January 5.

    Processing  for the old (pre-version 2000) versions of the Prepare-Enrich inventories is no longer available. 

    If you have not yet updated your accreditation to Version 2000 please see the list of Training Days and update as soon as possible.  Remember that Version 2000 was introduced in 1998 - you can easily tell whether you are Version 2000 trained by looking in your Manual at the title page inside the cover.