Beliefs, Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness

Abstract

The Beliefs, Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness scale represents a seminal domain within the broader Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness/Spirituality for Use in Health Research, an instrument battery developed by a dedicated working group sponsored by the Fetzer Institute and the National Institute on Aging (NIA). Spearheaded by medical sociologist Ellen L. Idler and prominent scholars of religion, health, and aging, this measurement subscale was formulated to capture cognitive, theistic, and existential orientations distinct from institutional participation (e.g., service attendance) or private practices (e.g., prayer frequency). The instrument exists in two configurations: a comprehensive seven-item Long Form and an abbreviated two-item Short Form. The items evaluate central dimensions of personal theology and cognitive appraisal, including the subjective reliance on religion for strength and comfort, belief in life after death, divine benevolence, cosmic love, theological coping during crises, the valuation of intergenerational religious transmission, and teleological existential purpose. The response formats incorporate tailored response scales, including a 3-point strength scale, a 3-point categorical eschatological belief scale, and 5-point Likert-type agreement scales. Psychometric investigations—most notably validated on nationally representative data from the 1998 General Social Survey (GSS)—demonstrate robust construct validity, high convergent validity with measures of psychological well-being, intrinsic religiosity, and existential resilience, as well as satisfactory internal consistency (Cronbach’s α ranging between .72 and .82 for the core belief indicators). This article delivers an exhaustive academic examination of the scale’s theoretical foundation, psychometric architecture, structural validity, scoring protocols, and research utility within behavioral medicine, gerontology, and the psychology of religion.

Keywords

Beliefs, Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness, BMMRS, Ellen Idler, Fetzer Institute, National Institute on Aging, benevolent theism, life after death, teleology, religious coping, health psychology, meaning-making.

Authors

The Beliefs domain of the Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness/Spirituality (MMRS) was developed through the collaborative efforts of the Fetzer Institute/National Institute on Aging Working Group on Religiousness and Health (convened in 1995–1997, published formally in 1999 and psychometrically validated in 2003). The core authorship and intellectual leadership for this domain include:

• Ellen L. Idler, Ph.D. – Principal architect of the Beliefs subscale. Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Sociology and Director of the Religion and Public Health Collaborative, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Formerly with the Department of Sociology and Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University.
• Christopher G. Ellison, Ph.D. – Professor of Sociology, University of Texas at San Antonio; leading authority on religious epidemiology and mental health.
• Marc A. Musick, Ph.D. – Professor of Sociology and Senior Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin.
• Linda K. George, Ph.D. – Professor Emerita of Sociology, Duke University; pioneer in social factors, aging, and mental health.
• Neal Krause, Ph.D. – Marshall H. Becker Collegiate Professor Emeritus, School of Public Health, University of Michigan.
• Jeffrey S. Levin, Ph.D., M.P.H. – University Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health, Baylor University.
• Kenneth I. Pargament, Ph.D. – Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Bowling Green State University; leading theoretician of religious coping.
• Lynda H. Powell, Ph.D. – Department of Preventive Medicine, Rush University Medical Center.
• David R. Williams, Ph.D., M.P.H. – Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Institutional sponsorship was provided by the Fetzer Institute (Kalamazoo, Michigan) in collaboration with the National Institute on Aging (Bethesda, Maryland). Correspondence concerning the original working group monograph may be directed to the Fetzer Institute archives or the lead author at Emory University.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Beliefs subscale within the Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness/Spirituality battery is to provide an empirically sound, methodologically rigorous instrument capable of isolating cognitive, dogmatic, and existential religious convictions from behavioral, organizational, and social manifestations of religion. Prior to the late 1990s, the majority of epidemiological, sociological, and psychological research operationalized religion using rudimentary, single-item proxies—most commonly church attendance frequency or broad denominational affiliation. Such proxies conflated social integration, mobility, and community norms with internal psychological and theological worldviews.

The Fetzer/NIA Working Group determined that religious beliefs exert independent, powerful physiological and psychological effects that cannot be subsumed under organizational attendance. The specific objectives of this measurement tool are:

• Delineating Theological Cognitive Schemata: To assess the specific semantic content of an individual’s internalized faith—such as concepts of God as unconditionally loving, transcendent, and protective—which fundamentally alters cognitive appraisals of suffering, illness, and mortality.
• Investigating Health and Longevity Pathways: To elucidate the exact mechanisms through which internalized beliefs affect physical health outcomes, including neuroendocrine regulation, immune function, cardiovascular disease morbidity, and all-cause mortality, as posited in medical sociology and psychosomatic medicine.
• Measuring Existential and Teleological Meaning: To measure how beliefs in life after death and divine purpose furnish individuals with a sense of cosmic order, effectively dampening existential dread and terror associated with terminal illness, functional loss, and somatic decline.
• Distinguishing Adaptive vs. Maladaptive Cognitive Formulations: While the core Beliefs scale captures benevolent, supportive theistic beliefs, it provides a crucial comparative baseline against which religious struggle, feelings of divine abandonment, or punitive theological interpretations can be evaluated.
• Enabling Cross-Disciplinary Population Research: To provide brief, versatile, standardized items suitable for incorporation into large-scale multi-wave public health registries (such as the General Social Survey, the Health and Retirement Study, and the MacArthur Studies of Successful Aging) without imposing prohibitive respondent burden.

Psychological Construct

The scale operationalizes religious beliefs as a multidimensional cognitive architecture that shapes subjective experience, attributional processes, and emotional coping. Rather than assessing denominational orthodoxy or encyclopedic knowledge of scripture, the construct captures functional theological worldviews—beliefs that actively mediate how an individual perceives the self, society, adversity, and the cosmos. The seven items of the Long Form tap several interrelated sub-constructs:

1. Religious Coping Efficacy and Emotional Comfort

Represented by Item 1 (derived from the Yale Health and Aging Project), this facet evaluates the functional salience of religion as an emotional buffer. It measures the degree to which an individual’s internal religious commitment generates affective stability, perceived safety, and psychological resilience when confronting the vulnerabilities of aging, frailty, and psychosocial loss.

2. Eschatological Certainty / Afterlife Belief

Represented by Item 2 (derived from the General Social Survey), this dimension assesses the endorsement of post-mortem existence. In psychological theory, belief in an afterlife operates as a primary existential anchor, modifying human attitudes toward death anxiety, personal finitude, and the finality of physical trauma. It provides a cognitive compensatory mechanism that reframes temporal suffering as transient.

3. Benevolent Theism and Divine Agape

Items 3 and 5 measure the respondent’s mental model of God. Drawing upon attachment theory, an internalized image of God characterized by unfathomable love, supreme goodness, and steadfast presence functions as a secure attachment figure. In times of catastrophic loss, the belief that “God still loves me and that there is hope for the future” inhibits demoralization, helplessness, and the catastrophic interpretations common in clinical depression.

4. Cosmic Benevolence and Optimism

Item 4 (“Despite all the things that go wrong, the world is still moved by love”) taps into generalized existential trust. This construct aligns closely with psychological concepts of dispositional optimism and positive world assumptions (Janoff-Bulman’s benevolent world schema), reflecting a deep-seated conviction that systemic evil and tragedy are ultimately subordinate to a foundational metaphysical goodness.

5. Generative Religious Commitment

Item 6 assesses the psychological value placed on intergenerational continuity of religious faith (“I feel that it is important for my children to believe in God”). This taps Eriksonian generativity, where transmitting beliefs represents an essential developmental task of middle and late adulthood, reinforcing parental identity, family cohesion, and socio-religious perpetuation.

6. Teleological Attribution and Ultimate Purpose

Item 7 (“I think that everything that happens has a purpose”) captures teleological cognitive framing. This attributional style rejects cosmic randomness and absurdity, positing instead that all biographical occurrences—including trauma, physical illness, and grief—are subsumed within a purposeful overarching design, facilitating cognitive restructuring and benefit-finding.

Theoretical Framework

The development of the Beliefs subscale sits at the convergence of several major theoretical paradigms in psychology, sociology, and behavioral medicine:

Cognitive Appraisal and Coping Theory

Rooted in the transactional model of stress and coping established by Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman (1984), cognitive appraisal theory dictates that the physiological and psychological impact of a stressor is determined by an individual’s primary appraisal (evaluating what is at stake) and secondary appraisal (evaluating available coping resources). Religious beliefs constitute fundamental global schemas (Park, 2010) that fundamentally alter primary appraisal: events that might appear arbitrarily cruel or meaningless are appraised as meaningful, manageable, or encompassed by divine providence.

The Meaning-Making Model

Crystal Park’s Meaning-Making Model posits a dynamic interplay between global meaning (broad cognitive schemas, core beliefs, and ultimate goals) and situational meaning (the meaning attributed to a specific stressful encounter). The Beliefs scale directly indexes the core components of global meaning. When life crises occur, discrepancy between situational reality and global schemas generates distress. The strong endorsement of benevolent theism and teleology equips individuals with flexible cognitive structures to assimilate traumatic events without shattering their overarching worldview.

Attachment Theory to the Divine

Extending John Bowlby’s developmental attachment paradigm to the psychology of religion, Lee A. Kirkpatrick (2005) argued that for many believers, God functions psychologically as a primary attachment figure—an invisible, omnipotent safe haven and secure base. The beliefs measured in this scale, especially regarding God’s unfathomable goodness and enduring love during tragedy, reflect a secure internal working model of divine attachment that supports autonomous emotional regulation during severe health crises.

Sociological Functionalism and the Sacred Canopy

From a sociological vantage, the scale operationalizes Peter Berger’s concept of the Sacred Canopy (1967). Berger theorized that religion serves an essential world-maintaining function by shielding humanity from the terror of anomie and chaos. Beliefs in the purposeful nature of events and life after death establish a nomos—a meaningful cosmic order—that validates human suffering and provides normative continuity across life transitions.

Validity

The validity of the Beliefs subscale has been extensively documented in nationwide surveys, clinical investigations, and longitudinal studies of aging:

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was initially established through the 1998 General Social Survey (GSS), which incorporated the BMMRS modules into a probability sample of 1,445 non-institutionalized American adults (Idler et al., 2003). Confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) models confirmed that the Beliefs items formed a statistically distinct factor that diverged substantially from private religious practices (prayer, meditation), organizational religious participation, religious support, and forgiveness modules.

Convergent Validity

The scale exhibits robust convergent validity across numerous clinical and psychological metrics:

• Intrinsic Religiosity: Strong positive correlations with Allport and Ross’s Intrinsic Religious Orientation Scale ($r = .65$ to $.78, p < .001$), demonstrating that the scale accurately captures internalized, authentic spiritual valuation rather than utilitarian or extrinsic social religiousness.
• Psychological Well-Being: Statistically significant correlations with Ryff’s Scales of Psychological Well-Being, specifically with the Purpose in Life ($r = .42, p < .001$) and Positive Relations with Others subscales ($r = .35, p < .01$).
• Optimism: Positive associations with the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R; $r = .38, p < .001$), supporting the conceptual overlap between benevolent theological schemas and dispositional positive expectancies.

Discriminant Validity

The Beliefs items successfully discriminate cognitive faith from purely behavioral metrics. Correlations with frequency of public religious service attendance are moderate ($r = .38$ to $.48$), demonstrating that individuals may hold profound theological and teleological beliefs despite low attendance (e.g., homebound elderly, private individualists). Furthermore, the scale demonstrates minimal correlation with social desirability measures ($r < .15$), confirming that endorsements are not merely artifacts of impression management.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

Extensive epidemiological research demonstrates the predictive utility of the scale on mental and somatic health endpoints:

• Depressive Symptomatology: In longitudinal analyses of older adults, strong baseline endorsement of religious comfort and divine love significantly predicted lower incidence of clinical depression (measured via the CES-D) at three-year follow-up, controlling for baseline morbidity and socioeconomic status.
• Functional Independence and Coping with Chronic Pain: Higher scores on Item 1 (“source of strength and comfort”) and Item 5 (theistic resilience during tragedy) were associated with decreased pain-related catastrophizing and better self-rated functional performance among arthritis and cardiovascular patients.
• Mortality Hazard: In analyses conducted on the Yale Health and Aging Project cohort, older adults who identified religion as a profound source of strength and comfort exhibited significantly lower all-cause mortality hazards over a 12-year tracking window, independent of confounding demographic and health behavioral factors.

Reliability

The psychometric evaluation of the Beliefs domain demonstrates satisfactory to excellent reliability across diverse community, clinical, and geriatric populations:

Internal Consistency

Because the scale utilizes a mixture of response metrics (Item 1 uses a 3-point ordinal scale, Item 2 is categorical/trichotomous, and Items 3–7 utilize a standard 5-point Likert scale), internal consistency has predominantly been evaluated on the core 5-item Likert subset (Items 3 through 7):

• 1998 General Social Survey (GSS): The 5-item core belief scale yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .78$, indicating robust internal reliability in a nationally representative population (Idler et al., 2003).
• Multisite Healthcare Samples: Subsequent studies involving clinical populations (e.g., oncology patients, cardiac rehabilitation cohorts) have reported Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from $\alpha = .74$ to $\alpha = .82$.
• Composite Standardized Coefficient: When standardizing all 7 items (z-score transformations of Items 1 and 2 incorporated into the matrix), composite reliability metrics (McDonald’s $\omega$) frequently exceed $.80$.

Item-Total Correlations

Corrected item-total correlations for the core Likert items are uniformly substantial:

• Item 3 (God’s goodness and love): $r_{it} = .68$
• Item 4 (World moved by love): $r_{it} = .52$
• Item 5 (Remember God’s love in tragedy): $r_{it} = .64$
• Item 6 (Important for children to believe): $r_{it} = .55$
• Item 7 (Everything has a purpose): $r_{it} = .49$

Test-Retest Reliability

Temporal stability assessments conducted over intervals ranging from 6 weeks to 6 months reveal high stability coefficients ($r_{tt} = .79$ to $.86$), confirming that the instrument measures stable cognitive traits and crystallized theological worldviews rather than transient, state-dependent religious emotions.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Beliefs subscale has been scrutinized using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across multiple independent cohorts:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal Axis Factoring and Maximum Likelihood extraction with Promax (oblique) rotation conducted on the BMMRS dataset identified a distinct, robust “Theistic & Benevolent Worldview” factor. When examining the 5 Likert items (Items 3–7):

• A clear single-factor solution emerges accounting for over 52.8% of the total variance.
• Item loadings on this primary latent factor are consistently high: Item 3 (.81), Item 5 (.76), Item 6 (.66), Item 4 (.61), and Item 7 (.58).
• Item 2 (Belief in life after death), when included in broader unconstrained factor rotations, frequently loads moderately on the general Beliefs factor (.48) but occasionally exhibits cross-loadings onto existential/meaning dimensions, underscoring its unique eschatological status.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In structural equation modeling (SEM) evaluations of the full BMMRS battery, the measurement model specifying Beliefs as a first-order latent variable demonstrates exceptional model fit indices:

• Chi-Square / Degree of Freedom Ratio: $\chi^2/df = 2.14$
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $.974$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $.962$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $.041$ (90% CI [.032, .051])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $.033$

These indices confirm that the items reliably define a unidimensional latent theological belief construct that functions seamlessly within broader structural models of health, stress buffering, and longevity.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Standardized self-report psychometric rating scale; domain subscale of the Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality (BMMRS).
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), telephone survey, or online digital administration. Suitable for individual or group testing.
• Item Count:
  • Long Form: 7 items.
  • Short Form: 2 items (Items 1 and 2).
• Target Population: Adults (aged 18 and older), geriatric populations, epidemiological cohorts, and clinical medical/psychiatric patients.
• Estimated Completion Time: Approximately 2 to 3 minutes for the Long Form; under 1 minute for the Short Form.
• Response Formats:
  • Item 1: 3-point ordinal scale: 1 = None, 2 = A little, 3 = A great deal.
  • Item 2: 3-point categorical/nominal scale: 1 = Yes, 2 = No, 3 = Undecided.
  • Items 3–7: 5-point Likert agreement scale: 1 = Agree strongly, 2 = Agree somewhat, 3 = Can’t decide, 4 = Disagree somewhat, 5 = Disagree strongly.
• Scoring and Transformation Protocols:
  • Standard Likert Reverse-Coding: In the original survey formulation, lower numerical values represent stronger agreement (1 = Agree strongly). For intuitive clinical and psychometric reporting where higher scores indicate stronger religious belief, researchers typically reverse-score Items 3 through 7 such that: 5 = Agree strongly, 4 = Agree somewhat, 3 = Can’t decide, 2 = Disagree somewhat, 1 = Disagree strongly.
  • Core 5-Item Likert Composite: Summing reverse-scored Items 3 through 7 yields a total continuous raw score ranging from 5 to 25. Higher scores reflect a deeply internalized benevolent, theistic, and purposeful worldview.
  • Full 7-Item Standardization: Because Items 1, 2, and 3–7 utilize different metric structures, researchers constructing a global 7-item composite must standardize items into z-scores prior to summation: $Z_{total} = \sum_{i=1}^{7} z_i$, with Item 2 typically dichotomized (1 = Yes vs. 0 = No/Undecided) and reverse-scored Likert items.
  • Subscale Item-Level Analysis: In demographic and epidemiological studies (such as the GSS), items are frequently examined individually as separate predictor variables to assess the independent, divergent effects of afterlife belief versus divine benevolence.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Beliefs domain of the Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness was finalized in 1999 as part of the official working group report sponsored by the Fetzer Institute and the National Institute on Aging, with comprehensive psychometric validation published by Idler et al. in 2003:

• Year of Formal Publication: 1999 (Fetzer/NIA Working Group Report); 2003 (Empirical GSS validation in Research on Aging).
• Copyright and Licensing: The instrument is in the public domain. The Fetzer Institute and the National Institute on Aging established this measurement battery to foster open, rigorous, and standardized scientific inquiry into religion and health.
• Fees: Free of charge for academic, scientific, non-commercial clinical, and epidemiological research. No licensing fees or royalty payments are required.
• Citation Requirement: Investigators utilizing the instrument are required to cite the original Fetzer/NIA monograph and the foundational empirical validation papers (Idler et al., 2003, 2004) in all scholarly publications and clinical reports.

References

• Berger, P. L. (1967). The sacred canopy: Elements of a sociological theory of religion. Doubleday. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL5547466M/The_sacred_canopy
• Fetzer Institute / National Institute on Aging Working Group. (1999). Multidimensional measurement of religiousness/spirituality for use in health research: A report of the Fetzer Institute/National Institute on Aging Working Group (pp. 31–34). John E. Fetzer Institute. https://fetzer.org/resources/multidimensional-measurement-religiousnessspirituality-use-health-research
• Idler, E. L., Musick, M. A., Ellison, C. G., George, L. K., Krause, N., Ory, M. G., Pargament, K. I., Powell, L. H., Underwood, L. G., & Williams, D. R. (2003). Measuring multiple dimensions of religion and spirituality for health research: Conceptual background and findings from the 1998 General Social Survey. Research on Aging, 25(4), 327–365. https://doi.org/10.1177/0164027503252749
• Idler, E. L., & Kasl, S. V. (1992). Religion, disability, depression, and the timing of death. American Journal of Sociology, 97(4), 1052–1079. https://doi.org/10.1086/229863
• Kirkpatrick, L. A. (2005). Attachment, evolution, and the psychology of religion. Guilford Press.
• Koenig, H. G., King, D. E., & Carson, V. B. (2012). Handbook of religion and health (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195335958.001.0001
• Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer Publishing Company.
• Pargament, K. I. (1997). The psychology of religion and coping: Theory, research, practice. Guilford Press.
• Park, C. L. (2010). Making sense of the meaning-making model: Its conceptualization, evidence, and future directions. Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 257–301. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018301

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)