[ms] The Society’s Perception towards the need of Spiritual Counselling Service

Abstract

This study was conducted to identify the perception towards the need of spiritual counselling among the society in Alor Gajah District, Melaka. The spiritual is one of the aspects in counselling that needs to be looked at, since a lot of life problems are due to people’s negligence in managing their spiritual aspect. However, most counselling services in Malaysia were founded under the western approach and this approach rarely used spiritual aspect in its approach. Therefore, there is a need for this study to be conducted in order to analyse the society’s perception towards the need of spiritual counselling among society. This quantitative study is both descriptive and inference were used Client Attitudes Towards Spirituality in Therapy (CAST) questionnaires and answered by 100 respondents. The reliability of the test was tested using the Alpha Cronbach test where the result for Religious Discussion is 0.79 as the score for spiritual discussion was tested at 0.83. This showed that both measurements are consistent. The data was further analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) software and t-test and one-way ANOVA were conducted to measure the difference between the variables. Post hoc test was conducted to analyze the significant difference based on race variable. The result from the study shows that there is high need of spiritual counseling among respondents. The study also indicates that there is no significant difference between the society’s perception towards the need of spiritual counseling based on gender, level of education and age. However, there is a significant difference between the needs with the race of the respondents. Overall, this study provides an exposure to the society towards the need of including the spiritual and religious aspect in counseling service. By having this aspect in service, it is hopefully able to fulfill human’s need and help them to solve their problems, eventually helping them to achieve prosperity in life.