In lieu of the traditional text data analysis methods, structural topic modeling was utilized to analyze the text contents of 255 self‐report inventories of religion and spirituality (R/S) published from 1929 to 2017. The study had two objectives: (a) to clarify and identify the latent dimensions of R/S inherent in the items of the measures; and (b) to examine and demonstrate the usefulness of a longitudinal topic modeling in the study of R/S. We identified 5,617 unique text terms from the measures and fitted topic models on those terms to extract latent dimensions called topics. We also simultaneously analyzed the longitudinal effect of publication decade (i.e., 1950s–2010s) on the topics. A topic model with three topics was chosen to best support the data: Experience of Transcendence (Topic 1), Engagement in Transcendence (Topic 2), and Essence of Transcendence (Topic 3). In addition, the longitudinal analysis revealed that Topic 1 showed a continual increase over the decades, while Topics 2 and 3 both demonstrated a gradual decrease, in effect matching the general trend of Topic 1's increasing popularity in society and the academia.

中文翻译：

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宗教与灵性的维度：纵向主题建模方法

代替传统的文本数据分析方法，结构主题建模用于分析1929年至2017年发布的255个宗教和灵性自我报告清单（R / S）的文本内容。该研究具有两个目标：（a）澄清和确定措施项中固有的R / S的潜在维度；（b）研究和证明纵向主题建模在R / S研究中的有用性。我们从这些度量中确定了5,617个唯一的文本术语，并根据这些术语拟合了主题模型，以提取称为主题的潜在维度。我们还同时分析了出版十年（即1950-2010年代）对这些主题的纵向影响。选择了具有三个主题的主题模型以最好地支持数据：超越经验（主题1），参与超越（主题2），和超越的本质（主题3）。此外，纵向分析显示，主题1在过去的几十年中持续增长，而主题2和3都在逐渐下降，实际上与主题1在社会和学术界日益普及的总体趋势相符。