Grant Allows for Further Life Satisfaction Assessment in Women Religious
Dr. Maria Clara Kreis, assistant director and outreach coordinator in the University Counseling and Wellbeing Center, has been awarded $390,000 in grant funding from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to produce and promote a manual for her Life Satisfaction Scale for Apostolic Women Religious (LSSAWR).
The LSSAWR is used to assess satisfaction levels among women committed to a religious life. Kreis, an ordained sister herself in the Sisters of Divine Providence, developed the LSSAWR in response to a declining number of women in religious orders.
“There is a need to study the motivational factors of these women within the Roman Catholic Church,” explained Kreis. “Our goal for the scale, with its manual, is to assist women religious individually and communally in discerning their call to service in the world.”
She believes the scale has the potential to be used as a screening tool to identify and assess satisfaction levels across generations of women religious.
Grant funding will also be used to translate the LSSAWR and accompanying manual into Spanish in order to make it available to the Spanish-speaking generation of women who have joined religious life over the past few years.
Hilton Foundation grant programs are used to improve the lives of disadvantaged and vulnerable people and to support the ministry of Catholic Sisters worldwide.