The development of the Revised Religious Life Inventory (RLI-R) by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis

Abstract

The Religious Life Inventory (RLI: Batson & Schoenrade, 1991) was designed to assess the extrinsic, intrinsic and quest orientations of religiosity and doubts have been expressed in the literature about its psychometric properties. An evaluation of the scale’s performance with a large sample of young adults of varying religious affiliations or none has shown that the instrument is not susceptible to confirmatory factor analysis. Several items that appear to have little discriminative ability and others that are ambiguous with respect to the orientations they are intended to represent have been identified. The structure suggested by an exploratory factor analysis has been subjected to sequential confirmatory factor analyses and a revised model has been developed which meets a variety of goodness of fit criteria and remains consistent with the original three-factor structure of the RLI. The Revised Religious Life Inventory, RLI-R, includes 24 of the original 32 items, and demonstrated improved scale reliability for the quest orientation and an unchanged reliability for the intrinsic orientation. A comparison of the original and revised instruments with respect to the frequency of church attendance and personal prayer, and religious affiliation suggests that the RLI-R is an improved instrument for future studies of religious orientation.

Introduction

Hills, Francis, Argyle, and Jackson (2004) have examined the associations between the 21 primary personality factors and a number of religious variables and observed that when the personality factors were jointly factor analysed with the extrinsic, intrinsic and quest dimensions of religiosity, the dimensional variables appeared as a separate and self-contained factor. It was concluded that different ways of being religious have more in common with one another, than with any of the personality factors included in the study. It is the aim of the present study further to explore the relationships among the extrinsic, intrinsic and quest dimensions of religiosity.

The idea that there are psychologically different ways of being religious can be traced back to the work of James (1902) who recognised two types of religious response that were related to personal temperamental predispositions. “Healthy-minded” individuals tend to be born happy and to see life as good. In the religious sphere, their primary feeling is a sense of gratitude to God with whom they seek union. On the other hand, there are “sick souls” who are sensitive to worldly evils and are acutely aware of the prevalence of suffering and of the inevitability of death. However, with the realisation that suffering has an immortal significance, the religious individual comes to terms with melancholy and lives the religious life with zest and rapture. James also used the terms “once-born” to describe the healthy minded, and “twice born” to describe the sick soul who finds peace, harmony and truth through conversion and worldly renunciation. However, James’ studies were introspective and he did not attempt to verify them empirically.

Allport (1954) identified these different outlooks as “extrinsic” and “intrinsic”, respectively religion as a means and religion as an end. “Extrinsic values are always instrumental and utilitarian. Persons with this orientation may find religion useful in a variety of ways—to provide security and solace, sociability and distraction, status and self-justification. The embraced creed is lightly held or else selectively shaped to fit needs that are more primary. In theological terms the extrinsic type turns to God, but without turning away from self”. On the other hand, those with an intrinsic orientation “find their master motive in religion. Other needs, strong as they may be, are regarded as of less ultimate significance, and they are, so far as possible, brought into harmony with the religious beliefs and proscriptions. Having embraced a creed, the individual endeavours to internalise it and follow it fully. It is in this sense that he lives his religion” (Allport & Ross, 1967, p. 434). To provide a means for the empirical assessment of these two orientations, Allport and Ross (1967) developed the Religious Orientation Scale (ROS).

Batson and his colleagues (Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993) have argued for the presence of another dimension of religious experience, quest, “the degree to which an individual’s religion involves an open-ended, responsive dialogue with existential problems raised by the contradictions and tragedies of life” (1993, p. 169). Quest-oriented individuals are those for whom religion is an interactive way of finding meaning in their personal and social worlds, and who strive to cope with their religious doubts in a self-critical manner. The quest concept places greatest emphasis on constant questioning and the entertainment of doubt as a means of spiritual growth. Examination of the quest dimension has attracted special interest, perhaps because it seeks to measure an intellectual, rather than a dogmatic approach to religion, and is the dimension most in tune with a liberal religious outlook.

The dimension of quest, along with extrinsic and intrinsic religiosities, has been incorporated in the Religious Life Inventory (Batson & Schoenrade, 1991). Although the extrinsic, intrinsic and quest dimensions were originally conceived as different ways of being religious: “The dimensions are independent, unrelated, and not interchangeable” (Batson et al., 1993, p. 189), it has not been claimed that they are mutually exclusive. Some overlap between the subscales of the RLI, including the presence of several items that appear to load more or less equally on different dimensions, has also been reported (Batson & Schoenrade, 1991), and Hills and Francis (2003) recently reported some non-trivial intercorrelations among the main orientations. It is evident that the RLI possesses a relatively complex structure.

The purpose of this paper is: (a) further to explore the structure of the RLI with a substantial cross-denominational sample, (b) to examine the statistical associations among the extrinsic, intrinsic and quest orientations of religiosity and (c) to investigate the RLI by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, since it appears that the scale has not previously been modelled in this manner.