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Review
. 2008 Jun;47(2):134-63.
doi: 10.1007/s10943-008-9165-2. Epub 2008 Mar 6.

Measuring religiousness in health research: review and critique

Daniel E Hall  1 , Keith G Meador, Harold G Koenig
Affiliations
Review

Measuring religiousness in health research: review and critique

Daniel E Hall et al. J Relig Health. 2008 Jun.

Abstract

Although existing measures of religiousness are sophisticated, no single approach has yet emerged as a standard. We review the measures of religiousness most commonly used in the religion and health literature with particular attention to their limitations, suggesting that vigilance is required to avoid over-generalization. After placing the development of these scales in historical context, we discuss measures of religious attendance, private religious practice, and intrinsic/extrinsic religious motivation. We also discuss measures of religious coping, wellbeing, belief, affiliation, maturity, history, and experience. We also address the current trend in favor of multi-dimensional and functional measures of religiousness. We conclude with a critique of the standard, "context-free" approach aimed at measuring "religiousness-in-general", suggesting that future work might more fruitfully focus on developing ways to measure religiousness in specific, theologically relevant contexts.

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Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
Comparing Domains of Religiousness Notes: Domains of religiousness from each scheme are arranged for easy comparison.
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
Comparing Intrinsic and Extrinsic Religiousness Notes: Original items are arranged to make comparison easier. The Intrinsic and Extrinsic items on Hoge’s scale are denoted as (I) or (E). The extrinsic items from Allport & Ross’ scale are arranged according to Kirkpatrick’s (1989) factor analysis. Please note that the first two questions in both Intrinsic scales are identical. Note also that the Extrinsic questions in Hoge’s scale are identical to three items from Allport and Ross’ scale. Although questions 3–9 are unique to Allport & Ross’ intrinsic scale, they all score in an inverse relationship with the first three items on Kirkpatrick’s (1989) “Residual” subscale of extrinsic items (bottom third column). **These three items were chosen for the Duke Religion Index because they are the highest loading items according to a principal factor analysis of 458 consecutively admitted medical patients (Koenig et al., 1997).
Figure 3:
Figure 3:
Promising New Scales: SCSOF and SBI-15R
Figure 4:
Figure 4:
Functional Scales
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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