question was used from the SIBS questionnaire. Two groups of participants were created

using one research question from the SIBS questionnaire. Those with high scores for

spirituality were considered highly spiritual. The majority (69.4%) of the respondents

were highly spiritual. A partial correlational analysis was used to identify a relationship

between a participants' high spirituality and the variables, age, pain report for three days

and analgesic medication use postoperatively, controlling for self-assessed health. There

was no relationship for spirituality and the variables. Therefore, hypothesis 1 was

rejected. Participants who have a high degree of spirituality did not tend to have less pain

and did not tend to use less analgesic medication postoperatively. Although there was a

high participant response to spirituality, the possibility of spiritual coping did not tend to

influence pain or pain medicine use after joint replacement surgery.

Health Self-Assessment, Pain Report and Analgesic Medication Use

 It was hypothesized that participants who consider themselves healthy will report

less pain and use less analgesic medication postoperatively. The health variable "In

general would you say your health is: excellent, very good, good" was used to identify

those participants with a high score on health assessment. Of the participants, 81.7%

rated their health in this positive way. Correlation analysis found that persons who

considered themselves healthy tended to have less pain on each day postoperatively but

they did not tend to use less pain medication. Therefore, there was no association

between high health scores and less pain medication use. Further analysis using a partial

correlation controlling for the spirituality variable, found similar results; a healthy

assessment was related to less pain for the three days postoperatively and had no

relationship with the amount of pain medication.