MEASURING THE SOCIO-SPIRITUAL ENVIRONMENT: A MIND-HEART-CONDUCT FRAMEWORK AND COMPOSITE INDEX FOR UZBEKISTAN

Abstract

Since 2019, Uzbek policy has called for a method to determine and improve the state of communities' "socio-spiritual environment" (SSE), but existing ratings count spiritual-educational events or score socio-economic conditions, and no validated instrument measures the environment itself. This article proposes a framework and a composite index that measure the SSE as the collective spiritual state of a territorial community. A conditions-activities-state (CAS) logic model keeps only indicators of state in the index, which limits the distortions predicted by Campbell's law. Following the tripartite model of attitudes, eight dimensions form three layers: mind (information culture; ideological immunity, understood as resilience to manipulation), heart (values, mutual trust, harmony) and conduct (civic activity, family stability, legal order), measured by 32 survey, administrative and expert indicators. The Socio-Spiritual Environment Index (SSEI) uses fixed goalposts and geometric aggregation, and Alkire-Foster cut-offs identify "problem points" for targeted support rather than ranking. The validation plan is fixed before data collection.