METHODS FOR COLLECTING SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES DATA AMONG OLDER ADULTS: DIARY-INTERVIEW STUDY

Abstract

The growing number of older adults worldwide is inevitable. In Malaysia particularly, Muslim‟s older adults ought to be equipped with Islamic mobile applications in order to optimize their chances of ageing successfully. Nevertheless, the uptake of study pertaining how to capture spiritual experiences of older adults‟ for Islamic mobile applications is less. It is very important to identify spiritual experiences for older people in order to develop Islamic applications that meet the needs of older people. Many researchers are interested in exploring spiritual user experience in general but did not describe the spiritual experiences in detail. Therefore, in this paper, we describe our exploration of using workshops, interviews and diary method to obtain older adults‟ spiritual experiences while engaging Islamic mobile application. A case study of 11 older adult participants was conducted by using Quran Bahasa Melayu application as a tested tool. The finding shows that diary-interview method is able to capture spiritual experiences of the older adult participants. Besides that, we propose Islamic Spirituality Experiences Model (iSEM) for evaluation guidance of Quran mobile applications