This paper is aimed to review a research article done by Sarah J. Mason, Frank P. Deane, Peter J.

Kelly and Trevor P. Crowe under the title of Do Spirituality and Religiosity Help in the Management of Craving in Substance Abuse Treatment? which was published in Informa Healthcare online journal in 2009. The research which was conducted by these researchers is mainly aimed to examine the relationship between spirituality, religiosity as well as self-efficacy and the management of craving in substance abuse treatment. In other words, it concerns about to what extend the level of spirituality, religiosity and self-efficacy play important roles in helping the drug addicts to control craving behaviour toward drug and alcohol while they are under treatment. This study was conducted at the Lake Macquarie Recovery Service Centre by which it is a Christian-based rehabilitation centre for male drug abusers. In this study, 77 male participants were voluntarily participating in the survey conducted. The questionnaire was constructed by combining several established-questionnaires which measure the desire and the craving for alcohol, person self-efficacy in restraining him from taking drug and alcohol in relapse-risk situation, the religious background and behaviour, the level of spirituality and the helpfulness of the spirituality in coping with craving and preventing relapse. After all, correlation analysis is conducted to demonstrate their predictive relationships. The review of this research article will specifically analyse the main findings of the research, the argumentation which include the usefulness and the limitation of the study as well as the suggestion for the future research. Firstly, as far as research is concerned, the finding will be the most important part to be discussed on. From the research, it is found that there is significantly negative relationship between the craving and spirituality with correlation value of -0.30.Nevertheless, there are positive correlations found between spirituality and self-efficacy with the correlation value of 0.33, and also between spirituality and religiosity with the correlation value of 0.69. In addition, it indicates that the self-efficacy is negatively correlated with craving with the correlation value of -0.42 and surprisingly it is found that religiosity is not related to craving. Besides that, after further analysis the researchers found that self-efficacy is actually mediating the relationship between the spirituality and craving by which spirituality lead to the increment of self-efficacy which in turn lead to decrease craving. This finding might lead to several discussion and argumentation. It is clear that most of the independent variables is not strongly predict the dependent variable which is the craving as it produce none significant result except for spirituality. Nevertheless, spirituality per se is not really predicting the decreasing of craving as this independent variable is mediated by self-efficacy. This might be due to the limitation of the questionnaire used to

measure the constructs which become the independent variables in this research. For example, the questionnaires related to religious background as well as spirituality are found only focusing on the performing practical ritual obligation of religion as well as participation in spiritual activities which actually insufficient to determine the religiosity and spirituality. The aspect of understanding the religion itself as a whole and the aspect of spiritual belief and realization especially on how the samples perceive their life situation from spiritual perspective are abandoned here. Therefore, more precise definition is needed so that it will not mislead the research to concern only on the surface level and consequently more accurate result can be obtained. In addition, it is found that the correlation between religiosity and selfefficacy is not being mentioned at all. It might be the self-efficacy is mediating the religiosity too. The questionnaire also misses to measure how religiosity help in handling craving as it does for spirituality. Thus further analysis and explanation should be made on this matter. Although, this research has some weaknesses in determining the element of spirituality and religiosity it should measure, overall there are many usefulness of this research study. First thing, this research has come out with the idea that religiosity and spirituality should not be treated as the same thing by which most of the time they tend to be viewed as similar. Here the researchers have been successful to demonstrate the difference of the two even though not in a very precise way. This is really a new invention in research especially in studying the impact of religion and spiritual aspect toward human life specifically in human personal development. Secondly, this research has created an awareness that the inner part of human beings plays important role in helping them to grow and improve their life especially in the case of drug addicts which treatment per se will not grant the positive changes. Thirdly, this research also indirectly indicates the important of religion and spiritual aspect to be considered in treatment especially in drug rehabilitation treatment to enhance self-efficacy so that a person could successfully make positive changes and prevent relapse when he comes out to face the world. Thus, these good things really make this article research is valuable and should be read by everyone. Instead of the usefulness, this research study also has several limitations that could affect the validity of the finding. Most of the limitation of this research study are realized and admitted by the researchers. The most important limitation which is stated in the research is related to the cross sectional design of the study whereby the causal relationship cannot be determined between the variables examined in the research. This can be referred to the correlation values of each pair of the variables whereby most of the variables are not significantly correlated. Therefore the independent variables especially the self-efficacy and religiosity are not the strong predictor to the dependent variables of craving. In addition, the

result of the finding is relying merely on the self-report and the researchers did not make an observation on actual behaviour to confirm the self-report. Thus, the tendency to not actually reveal the truth is very high and uncontrollable. Besides that, the samples of this study involve only those who reside in the Christian rehabilitation centre and none of the samples come from secular rehabilitation centre. Thus, no clear comparison can be made to ensure that the spiritual and religious approaches work better. Due to the limitation discussed above, several aspects have to be concerned to improve this research in the future. First, the operational definition of each variable especially the independent variables have to be precisely defined to ensure the validity of the measurement tool. Secondly, a comparison study has to be done by taking sample from none religion-based treatment centre to demonstrate the difference and to get more accurate finding that spirituality and religiosity are work better in drug treatment. Beside that, the sample should be selected from female too in order to control the gender factor which might influence the recovery. In addition, the samples from other religion-based centres such as Islam, Buddhist and so on should also being involved so that the result can be generalized as it could represent human population as whole. It is acknowledged that there is several numbers of samples who are not the Christian follower. However the number is too small and did not have the representative value. Fifthly, longitudinal study should be conducted to observe either relapse is happening or not after they have come out from the centre and to demonstrate how far spirituality and religiosity can really prevent relapse which due to the craving. Thus, it is hoped that these suggestions might help in improving further future research on this subject matter. In conclusion, this research article is really good and interesting as the researchers dare to find out something very subjective and less discussed as such spirituality and religiosity. Furthermore, they enable to briefly demonstrate the difference between the two. Even though, the result is not really strong to demonstrate the influences, the researchers had successful in creating awareness and inspire the use of religious psycho-spiritual method in drug abuse treatment whereby the approach concerns on the inner part of human being that helps them to grow, to improve and to maintain their stability. Therefore, it is not too extreme to consider this study as a stimulator to encourage more research on religious and spiritual aspects in human being that affects the positive behaviour modification especially in drug abuse treatment. Further future research with some improvement might be able to find out more about this and finally to prove and support this research study.