Implicit spiritual assessment: an alternative approach for assessing client spirituality

To provide optimal services, a spiritual assessment is often administered to understand the intersection between clients' spirituality and service provision. Traditional assessment approaches, however, may be ineffective with clients who are uncomfortable with spiritual language or who are otherwise hesitant to discuss spirituality overtly. This article orients readers to an implicit spiritual assessment, an alternative approach that may be more valid with such clients. The process of administering an implicit assessment is discussed, sample questions are provided to help operationalize this approach, and suggestions are offered to integrate an implicit assessment with more traditional assessment approaches. By using terminology that is implicitly spiritual in nature, an implicit assessment enables practitioners to identify and operationalize dimensions of clients' experience that may be critical to effective service provision but would otherwise be overlooked.