Religiosity: Does One " Size " Fit All

Social Science Research Network, 2015

Incorporating religiosity variables into macro-and micro-marketing studies can add to the insights produced. This research used data from a national survey of 725 adults, fielded in January 2015, to illustrate how religiosity measures differ. Responses to 34 survey questions were used to construct six factor-based religiosity measures. Six linear regressions tried to predict the religiosity factors with demographics, a social desirability bias measure, and a political preference indicator as independent variables. While some independent variables were significant, the six religiosity and spirituality factors (Intrinsic Motivation, Extrinsic-Social, Extrinsic-Personal, Tentativeness Quest, Complexity Quest, and Doubt Quest) contained considerable information that was not explained by the regressions. According to one estimate, more than two-thirds of people on our planet would say that religion is important in their daily lives . Religious individuals allocate time and money to their religion and gain satisfaction from the experience, while organizations spend significant funds "marketing" different religions to prospective members. Religion and a somewhat related concept, spirituality, can have an important influence on both attitudes and behaviors. However, measures of religiosity and spirituality have only been included in a few marketing studies. Studies that included measures of religiousness or spirituality have found links with a variety of consumer values and behaviors. Various religiosity measures have been associated with life satisfaction and happiness (

Archive for the Psychology of Religion / Archiv für Religionspychologie, 2008

Summary At least 177 scales are available to researchers who want to measure religiosity, but questions exist as to exactly what these scales are measuring and in whom they are measuring it. A review of these scales found a lack items designed to measure ethical action in ...

European Journal of Mental Health

A wide range of survey-based tools has been developed to measure religiosity, although the most commonly applied approaches tend to focus on 'generic' interpretations of religiosity for practical and generalising reasons. However, these generic approaches have not always been satisfactory due to the lack of variation in responses and the potential for poor correlation between the generic religiosity measure and the overall impact of faith in respondents' lives, particularly in less secular contexts. This led us to explore whether there is a difference between measuring religiosity using a 'generic' versus a 'mature' approach using 227 Christian respondents on Bantayan Island, the Philippines. The findings suggest that overall religiosity among our respondents was high for both measures, that the measures are strongly correlated, and that there was no statistically significant difference between the scores for each scale; however, there was evidence to suggest that the two scales are examining different dimensions of religiosity. When correlating the two religiosity scores to other scales on our survey, there was no statistically significant difference among the correlations when using the mature or generic measure of religiosity. This has important implications for mental health and care research methodologies, for which we highlight the importance of using contextually appropriate measures that incorporate various dimensions of religiosity.

The Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS) is a measure of the centrality, importance or salience of religious meanings in personality that has been applied yet in more than 100 studies in sociology of religion, psychology of religion and religious studies in 25 countries with in total more than 100,000 participants. It measures the general intensities of five theoretical defined core dimensions of religiosity. The dimensions of public practice, private practice, religious experience, ideology and the intellectual dimensions can together be considered as representative for the total of religious live. From a psychological perspective, the five core-dimensions can be seen as channels or modes in which personal religious constructs are shaped and activated. The activation of religious constructs in personality can be regarded as a valid measure of the degree of religiosity of an individual. The CRS thus derives from the five dimensional measures a combined measure of the centrality of religiosity which is suitable also for interreligious studies. The paper presents the theoretical basis and rationale of its construction with different versions of the CRS in 20 languages with norm values for 21 countries. Furthermore, the paper presents versions of different extension and describes specific modifications that were developed for studies with Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims.

2011

Abstract: There is a multitude of instruments for measuring religiosity/spirituality. Many of these questionnaires are used or even were developed in the context of studies about the connection between religiosity/spirituality and health. Thus, it seems crucial to note that measures can focus on quite different components along a hypothetical path between stressors and health.

2011

Journal of Empirical Theology, 2020

Personality and Individual Differences, 2007

Convergent and discriminant validity of religiosity measures among church members and non-members Scheepers, Peer; Janssen, Jacques; Reitsma, J.

We present a study of the dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity for 26 countries with a Christian heritage, based on the 1998 and 2008 rounds of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Religion survey, using both exploratory and multi-group confirmatory factor analyses. The results of the exploratory factor analysis showed that three factors, common to Christian and religiously unaffiliated respondents, could be extracted from our initially selected items and suggested the testing of four different three-factor models using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. For the model with the best fit and measurement invari-ance properties, we labeled the three resulting factors as "Beliefs in afterlife and miracles", "Belief and importance of God" and "Religious involvement." The first factor is measured by four items related to the Supernatural Beliefs Scale (SBS-6); the second by three items related to belief in God and God's perceived roles as a supernatural agent; and the third one by three items with the same structure found in previous cross-cultural analyses of religiosity using the European Values Survey (ESS) and also by belief in God. Unexpectedly, we found that one item, belief in God, cross-loaded on to the second and third factors. We discussed possible interpretations for this finding, together with the potential limitations of the ISSP Religion questionnaire for revealing the structure of religiosity. Our tests of measurement invari-ance across gender, age, educational degree and religious (un)affiliation led to acceptance of the hypotheses of metric-and scalar-invariance for these groupings (units of analysis). However, in the measurement invariance tests across the countries, the criteria for metric invariance were met for twenty-three countries only, and partial scalar invariance was accepted for fourteen countries only. The present work shows that the exploration of large multinational and cross-cultural datasets for studying the dimensionality and invariance of social constructs (in our case, religiosity) yields useful results for cross-cultural comparisons, but is also limited by the structure of these datasets and the way specific items are coded.