The Topic Structure of the Book of Mormon: Worldview Insights for Mental Health Professionals

This study examined the spiritually informed worldview of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through exploration of the topical structure of the Book of Mormon sacred text. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) was used to identify the latent topical structure of the Book of Mormon. The two research questions were (RQ1): What is the topical structure of the Book of Mormon?, and (RQ2): How do the level of topics vary by individual subcorpuses within the Book of Mormon? This effort produced a 30- topic model. The levels of 30 topics among the sections of the Book of Mormon were detailed. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for further study were presented. In addition, a discussion on how the worldview structures produced by this study can inform the practice of mental health professionals takes place.