Date

1-14-2026

Department

School of Health Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Health Sciences (PhD)

Chair

Colleen Law

Keywords

Service industry, resiliency, emotional intelligence, personality types, spiritual resiliency, substance abuse

Disciplines

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to quantify service industry workers’ resiliency’s relationships with their emotional intelligence, understanding of differing personality types, spiritual resiliency, and substance abuse, as these are all applicable to the biopsychosocial-spiritual model, which served as the theoretical framework. The study included administering the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS), the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SEIT), a self-reporting of employees’ understanding of differing personality types, a self-reporting of employees’ spiritual resiliency, and the Substance Use Brief Screen (SUBS) to social science graduate students working in the service industry. Resiliency was identified as the predictor variable and the other variables were recognized as the criterion variables. There were no statistically significant differences shown. Nevertheless, the predicted effects for each dependent variable were all clearly demonstrated in the observed trends. Thus, these results suggested that while not proven to be significant in the study at hand, these dependent variables may nevertheless still in fact have at least an indirect impact on these workers’ overall resiliency. Recommendations for further research included using the Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness (DiSC) tool to assess various personality types or more precisely, behavioral styles, and how they relate to resiliency among service industry workers; assessing coping using the Religious Coping Options Inventory to measure how religious and spiritual coping relate to resiliency; recruiting students from more male-academic majors and the commercial sector; assessing alternate dependent variables related to the biopsychosocial-spiritual model; and soliciting feedback from service industry leadership.

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