The science-and-religion fieldis awash in a sea of scales that threaten to drown researchers in data.
Scientists have developed scales and surveys that attempt to measure religiousness and its broader cousin, spirituality. Researchers traditionally have quantified religion’s intersection with other areas of life, like psychology and health, by looking at tangible quantities like worship service attendance.
Spirituality, a term that encompasses religion, casts a wider net but also yields less specific information.
Spirituality’s lack of definition may confound scientists’ ability to obtain statistically significant results. With new scales being published in journals every month, the time may have come to consolidate to only a few scales.
However, say the authors of these measures, the natural evolution may be for the statistically significant scales to survive.
Census taking
A quick Internet search for the keywords “scale” and “spiritual” or “religious” turns up hundreds of papers in PsychInfo, the American Psychological Association’s online database for psychology research, and PubMed, the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s database of biomedical citations and abstracts. Both databases catalogue religion-and-health scientists’ research.
Many of these studies use similar scales to measure spirituality and religion. Popular measures include Kenneth Pargament’s R-COPE scale, which measures how patients use religious beliefs to cope with illness and trauma, and Lynn Underwood’s daily spiritual experiences scale, which evaluates spirituality in people’s day-to-day lives. Some researchers who feel that current measures don’t capture what they’re trying to study in the field, have developed wholly new scales with acronyms like SpREUK, SMILE and ASPIRES. However, the more scales, the harder it is to share data effectively.
“We need to consolidate measures,” said Underwood, former vice president of the Fetzer Institute. “Continued proliferation of measure is problematic because everyone has their own take, and it’s only used in one or two studies and then it’s out there. The more scales you have, it just gets more dissipated.
“Sometimes you have to develop a scale that is relevant. But I think it’s important that we build on the scales that have been developed rather than start from scratch,” she said.
In 1999, researchers Peter Hill and Ralph Hood compiled more than 100 research measures for spirituality and published a book titled Measures of Religiosity.
According to Hill, a professor of psychology at Biola University’s Rosemead School of Psychology in La Mirada, Calif., these 125 scales represent the “more important, central measures of religion and religious experience and spirituality.”
Hill and Hood then grouped the scales into 17 different themes, including mysticism, religious fundamentalism, attitudes toward institutional religion and certainty of belief.
“Some of the better scales are out of the book,” said Hill, commenting that since the books’ publication, the number and strength of the current scales has expanded exponentially. “We have the interest and now the energy to make a second volume. I’m aware of at least as many new measures [as the original 125] that have come out in the last 10 years.”
Some of the old scales still have a place, Hill said, though they are limited in scope.
“Some of the really older measures — some back in the 1920s — have some real value to them, but often [researchers] did it with no funding. It was often just very small research projects conducted by a researcher at his or her institution,” said Hill.
Thomas Plante, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University in California, said recent public attention to religion-and-health and increased funding for research have caused this type of work to expand.
In the past, said Plante, “Psychologists and other researchers, they wouldn’t touch this stuff. This was sort of considered, ‘You’re not a real scientist; you’re a flake.’ Now we can do this.”
Hill agreed. “They often were quite limited, especially in terms of how generalizable they might be, which would be fine if you were working with a group of Protestants in a Christian college,” he said.
Heavy emphasis on Christianity limited information gathering, said developers of spirituality scales.
“Most of the scales out there had a number of problems associated with them. Either they didn’t quite capture what we wanted, because some of them were geared toward a Christian population,” said Plante, who created his own measurement tool, “or many of them, as you find in academics, were too long.”
Many religions under God
Many researchers say that questions can be created that can encompass most religions and cultures, despite differences.
Patricia Murphy, a professor in the department of religion, health and human values at Rush University in Chicago, said she believes that scientists could develop scale questions that would address many religious and spiritual beliefs. Many religions, she said, feature “belief in an afterlife, belief in a connection with people who’ve gone before or people on this Earth, belief in what are our responsibilities to each other.”
However, Buddhism tends to be an outlier, said Murphy, because most scales use the word “God” or reference a higher power.
A similar Western bias exists in many of the current measurement scales, Murphy said. “It’s hard because if you’re actually going to do this honestly, you need to develop measures that work within the Asian population and see if they’re good within that sample,” she said. This difference then necessitates a slightly different measurement tool, and another survey is created.
Some scales may not apply at all to some parts of the globe — especially Western Europe — because of the high degree of atheism.
Dr. Arndt Büssing, chair of medicinal theory and complementary medicine at the University of Witten-Herdecke in Germany, said incorporating atheists’ beliefs into questionnaires is difficult in cultures in which people may be turned off by being asked about traditional religion.
“In contrast to some other questionnaires, which measure beliefs of specific religious groups and ask about the relationship with God, we decided to account for the fact that [some] patients — in our area about 30 percent, in Eastern Germany more than 60 percent — are offended by institutional religion, or even terms such as ‘God,’ ‘Jesus,’ ‘praying,’ ‘church,’ et cetera,” Büssing said
of his scale, SpREUK, the German acronym for “spiritual and religious attitudes in dealing with illness.”
“Most do not have any trust in institutional religions, but search for an ‘outer truth’ they won’t call ‘God.’ Thus, they have an obvious problem of faith in their last and final days,” said Büssing.
However, broadening surveys to make them applicable to all people and cultures may not allow the tools to capture anything of value about how religion and spirituality intersect with specific parts of people’s lives.
Kenneth Pargament, a psychology professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, said specificity, and therefore a variety of measurements, have their place.
“If you have a measure that you use cross-culturally, then you sacrifice specificity for what makes a particular tradition unique,” Pargament said.
“The field needs to go beyond global measures of religion and spirituality into the specific ways that religion expresses itself,” he said.
Multiple paths, same direction
Though snags lie along the path to progress in the measurement of religion and spirituality in the science-and-religion field, most of the researchers are confident the field is headed in the right direction.
“As time goes on, some scales fall by the wayside, but I think that we’re just starting to understand the relation of mind, body and spirituality, and it’s very complex. In some ways, there’s a richness of people using a variety of measures to tease out what’s going on,” said Murphy. “If there’s a few good, solid measures able to pull out what’s going on, people are going to latch onto them.”
“People are getting there,” Murphy continued, adding that the field is “way ahead of where it was 10 years ago. I think it will evolve through the conversations with people as you do the research.”
Plante agreed that dialogue with the field’s experts would further the effort. “Now there’s a whole lot more people at the party — and the top people at the party, not the fringe folks, the best the profession has to offer,” said Plante, who said he was very optimistic about the field’s development. “There’s a whole lot more eyeballs and there’s a whole lot of brains taking a look at it.”
“The field is at an interesting crossroad,” said Ralph Piedmont, a professor of pastoral counseling at Loyola College in Maryland. “It can continue doing what it’s doing, generating all sorts of measures. But it’s not going to allow us to decide what is and what isn’t spirituality.” Piedmont, who has also developed a scale intended to adequately address the psychology of religion field, added that science-and-religion needs to develop reliable measures or “it will pass away in scientific relevance if it has nothing to contribute scientifically.”
Developing solid measures will ensure science-and-religion’s longevity, said Piedmont. “If the field starts buckling down and becomes more empirically focused in its work, then I think there’s a whole new world to be born out there.”
How the scales measure up:
Science-and-religion researchers have developed scales to study spirituality’s and religion’s roles in people’s mental, physical and emotional lives. Here’s a quick rundown of some major players, their scales and why they developed them.
Thomas Plante: Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire
“The problem with academics [is] sometimes they don’t understand the practical matters of trying to limit things in a way that you can be quick and efficient at it. Nine out of 10 scales in this area just tend to be too darn long. And that’s unnecessary.”
Lynn Underwood: DSES
(Daily Spiritual Experiences Scale)
“It’s not a measure of mystical experience in a dramatic sense, a sense of God’s presence, encouraging a sense of deep inner peace from their orientation to the divine, the longing for God. It’s about the sorts of things that might fuel your day, and I think that’s one of the reasons that it’s very useful.”
Kenneth Pargament: R-COPE
(Religious Coping)
“I was particularly interested in understanding the way religion expresses itself or comes to life in the most critical life situations. The existing measures of religiousness at the time tended to be quite global.”
Dr. Arndt Büssing: SpREUK
(German acronym for “spiritual and religious attitudes in dealing with illness”)
“One strength is that we have two manuals: Part one of the SpREUK describes attitudes, while part two ... asks for engagement in the different “forms” of spiritual [or] religious practice — conventional religious practice, unconventional spiritual practice, existentialistic practice, nature-oriented practice, humanistic practice. Two sides of the one moon!” More information:
Lynn Underwood’s daily spiritual experiences scale
Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire
Thomas G. Plante and Marcus Boccaccini, Santa Clara University
Please answer the following questions about religious faith using the scale below. Indicate the level of agreement (or disagreement) for each statement.
(1 - strongly disagree, 2 - disagree, 3 - agree, 4 - strongly agree)
__ 1. My religious faith is extremely important to me.
__ 2. I pray daily.
__ 3. I look to my faith as a source of inspiration.
__ 4. I look to my faith as providing meaning and purpose in my life.
__ 5. I consider myself active in my faith or church.
__ 6. My faith is an important part of who I am as a person.
__ 7. My relationship with God is extremely important to me.
__ 8. I enjoy being around others who share my faith.
__ 9. I look to my faith as a source of comfort.
__ 10. My faith impacts many of my decisions.
To score, total the points for each question. Scores will range from 10 (low faith) to 40 (high faith)
Reference: Plante, T.G., & Boccaccini, M. (1997). The Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire. Pastoral Psychology, 45, 375-387.