Centrality of Religiosity Scale - Test of Model Configuration, Reliability, and Consistency in Romania, Georgia, and Russia

Ackert, Michael (2021). Centrality of Religiosity Scale - Test of Model Configuration, Reliability, and Consistency in Romania, Georgia, and Russia. (Dissertation, Universität Fribourg, Philosophische Fakultät)

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Measurement is fundamental in science. Social sciences generally and psychology, in particular, depend on objective, valid, and reliable psychometric scales. In the 20th century, the psychology of religion and spirituality spent a long time searching for comprehensive and trustworthy instruments to assess psychological constructs in the field of empirical studies of religion and spirituality. This search has manifold causes and goals, one of them was to find an extensive measurement of the general religiosity. In 2003 a new instrument was introduced to the measurement of religiosity by Stefan Huber. The Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS) is based upon a new approach – centrality and content-model of measurement of religiosity. The model designs a comprehensive, integrative way to collect empirical evidence by a self-report scale – the CRS. Driven by the research question of whether the Centrality of Religiosity Scale is a reliable and constant instrument to assess religiosity, a systematic empirical test of the scale was done in three Eastern European countries i.e., Romania, Georgia, and Russia. The focus lied on the examination of internal consistency and external reliability as well as the configural, metric, and scalar invariance testing via multigroup confirmatory factor analysis of the short versions of the CRS, the Abrahamitic CRS-5 and the interreligious CRSi-7. Special attention was given to the time-invariance of the short versions of the CRS. Apart from methodological interest in psychometric scale performance, attention was given to the ability of the CRS to detect particularities of the local religious traditions in the three predominant Christian Orthodox countries. Findings suggest acceptable to good internal consistency coefficients with the lowest values of Cronbach’s ! and McDonald’s ω being in Georgia and the highest in Russia and Romania. Configural invariance could be observed in all analyzed samples, additionally, metric invariance is found in the Russian and Georgian dataset with the CRS-5 and in the Russian sample with the CRSi- 7, as well as scalar invariance with the CRS-5 in Georgia. Correlated indicator residuals that are stable over time imply that the measurement model of the CRS does not include all systematic variance of the core dimensions of religiosity. These findings show that the centrality of religiosity cannot capture the entire dynamic of religiosity, with some variance being left over which is indicative of particularities in the underlying religious tradition. The empirical results support the multidimensional model configuration, the reliability, and the consistency of the Centrality of Religiosity Scale. The scale seems suitable to assess religiosity as proposed by the theory behind it. However, attention is advised with the association of the residuals of the indicators. Applications in the context of Christian Orthodox tradition e.g., disclose the tendency of believers to partly bypass practical core dimensions of religiosity by carrying out some outward religious behavior. In Romania, the investigation show that highly religious believers tend to focus more on the experiential and intellectual aspects of faith life. Further, research on religion and spirituality with the CRS should consider more invariance testing while also taking into account the constraints on the indicator residuals to detect particularities of the analyzed samples. The configural invariance should be tested to ensure multidimensionality, while metric invariance is advisable if group comparison is of interest, and scalar invariance should be applied if the changes of latent means should be tracked. The results encourage further empirical investigations with the CRS e.g., cross-cultural comparisons, longitudinal studies, the examination of new hypotheses regarding the qualitative changes of faith which occur with higher or lower levels of centrality of religiosity, and further hypotheses regarding the inner dynamics of the postulated core dimensions of religiosity.

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