Comparative study of spiritual intelligence among students of professional and non-professional courses

The main objective of this study was to examine the spiritual intelligence among professional and non-professional students. A sample of 400 students was used; 200 students were those who offered professional courses and 200 were those who offered non-professional courses from Aligarh Muslim University Aligarh. The Spiritual Intelligence Self-Report Inventory (SISRI) developed by King and DeCicco (2007) was administered on these students. The data were analysed by t-test. The findings of present research clearly revealed that professional and non-professional students significantly differed with respect to spiritual intelligence. More specifically Professional students were found to have higher spiritual intelligence than non-professional students. Result also showed that SISRI was found to be reliable tool to measure four factors of spiritual intelligence: Critical Existential Thinking (CET), Personal Meaning Production (PMP), Transcendental Awareness (TA) and Conscious State Expansion (CSE) for the present sample with 0.857 cronbach's alpha. When we compared on four factors of spiritual intelligence: Critical Existential Thinking (CET), Personal Meaning Production (PMP), Transcendental Awareness (TA) and Conscious State Expansion (CSE), again we found that two groups differed significantly on these factors. The findings were discussed in the light of existence studies and ethical issues. Alternative explanations were also offered.