Young Adults' Experiences with Smartphone Apps for Spiritual Support

Abstract

This paper investigates how religiously unaffiliated young adults experience using smartphone apps to support their spirituality. We present an interview study using collaborative interpretative phenomenological analysis with 10 participants, each of whom discussed a different app. Our findings show how these apps support cognitive and emotional self-regulation, foster a sense of agency, deepen self-reflection, facilitate social connections and more. We found that the apps framed as overtly spiritual (e.g., Co-Star, Saged) were often experienced more relationally, while those framed as secular (e.g., Headspace, Balance) were experienced more individualistically. With these insights from spiritual experiences outside traditional religions, we expand an existing framework for sociotechnical spiritual support and offer three design implications: recognizing diverse spiritual definitions, accounting for varying user goals, and ensuring consistency in app worldview and design. This work contributes to ongoing discussions of digitally-mediated spirituality and informs the design of spiritual technologies for young adults outside traditional religious contexts.