Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale

1. Abstract

The Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale (IRMS), developed by sociologist Dean R. Hoge in 1972, is a psychometric instrument engineered to assess individual variations in personal religious orientation and motivational commitment. Originating from the conceptual foundations established by Gordon Allport and J. Michael Ross, as well as the theoretical clarifications introduced by Richard A. Hunt and Morton B. King regarding “ultimate versus instrumental” religiousness, the scale was constructed to isolate the core motivational impetus underpinning faith commitments. Unlike earlier multi-faceted or behaviorally confounded measurement batteries, the IRMS comprises 10 carefully calibrated items designed to tap a single underlying continuum: intrinsic faith versus extrinsic utilitarianism. Of the 10 statements, seven represent intrinsic religious motivation (conceptualized as internalizing religion as a master motive and ultimate end in itself), while three capture extrinsic religious motivation (approaching religion as an instrumental means to secular, social, or moral ends).

The scale employs a 4-point Likert-type format ranging from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 4 (“strongly agree”). Scoring protocols typically involve reverse-coding the three extrinsic items and aggregating all responses to generate a continuous unidimensional index of intrinsic religious commitment, with alternative scoring strategies treating intrinsic and extrinsic components orthogonally or utilizing the intrinsic subscale independently. Psychometric investigations reveal robust internal consistency, yielding Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 (KR-20) reliability coefficients of .90 for the full 10-item instrument and Cronbach’s alpha values of .84 for abbreviated six-item adaptations. Criterion and construct validity have been substantiated through criterion-group nominations by ecclesiastical leaders, substantial convergent correlations (.71 to .87) with preceding measures by Feagin and Allport-Ross, and predictive associations with prosocial behavior, nonspontaneous helping, and psychological coping mechanisms during significant negative life events. The instrument remains widely utilized across sociology, personality psychology, and clinical research due to its brevity, psychometric parsimony, and deliberate exclusion of sectarian theological dogma.

2. Keywords

Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale, Dean R. Hoge, intrinsic religion, extrinsic religion, psychology of religion, religious orientation, prosocial behavior, psychometrics, spiritual motivation, scale validation, scale reliability, Allport-Ross framework.

3. Authors

The Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale was formulated and psychometrically validated by Dean R. Hoge (1935–2008). At the time of the instrument’s inception and initial publication in 1972, Dr. Hoge served on the faculty of the Department of Sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and was actively affiliated with the Boys Town Center for the Study of Youth Development. Throughout his academic career, Hoge was recognized as a premier quantitative sociologist of religion, contributing seminal empirical investigations into generational religious trends, church participation, theological attitudes, financial stewardship, and clergy organizational dynamics.

Hoge’s institutional research was frequently supported by major national foundations and ecclesiastical organizations, culminating in over a dozen scholarly volumes and hundreds of peer-reviewed articles. Inquiries regarding archival documentation, historical project records, and sociological survey repositories associated with his scholarly estate are maintained within the Department of Sociology and the University Archives at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. In addition, significant collaborative validation work on shortened iterations was conducted in conjunction with Jackson W. Carroll, affiliated with the Hartford Seminary Foundation’s Center for Social and Religious Research.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale is to quantify the motivational dynamic driving an individual’s personal religious identification, differentiating those who live their faith as an internalized master motive from those who utilize religious association for instrumental, secular, or social purposes. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, empirical research within the psychology of religion encountered persistent methodological hurdles, notably the frequent confounding of religious motivations with specific denominational doctrines, behavioral compliance (e.g., church attendance metrics), sectarian creeds, and multidimensional personality traits. Hoge recognized that assessing the behavioral manifestations of religious life often obscured the fundamental psychological “why” behind faith engagement.

In developing this instrument, Hoge sought to provide social scientists with a unidimensional, conceptually pure operationalization of intrinsic religious motivation. By consciously designing an assessment tool that minimizes behavioral checklists (such as frequency of private prayer or ritual fasting) and sectarian theological positions (such as precise eschatological beliefs or Christological doctrines), the IRMS allows cross-group comparisons across diverse theological frameworks. While the instrument emerged from and was initially normed within the Christian tradition, only two of its ten items make general reference to “God,” one refers to “the Divine,” and none invoke particularized confessional markers, rendering the scale broadly adaptable across diverse monotheistic and spiritual traditions.

In clinical, behavioral, and social research contexts, the IRMS serves multiple evaluative functions. Within personality and social psychology, it provides a validated metric for deciphering paradoxical empirical associations, such as the classic tension between conventional religious participation and generalized social prejudice. Because unstructured or poorly defined measures of religiousness often yield conflicting correlations with altruism, ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, and psychological resilience, the IRMS provides a standardized criterion for isolating genuine intrinsic orientation. Clinically, researchers employ the IRMS to study how deeply internalized religious frameworks moderate health-related coping mechanisms, protect against depressive symptomatology during existential crises, and interact with therapeutic outcomes in spiritually integrated cognitive-behavioral interventions.

5. Psychological Construct

The core psychological construct measured by the IRMS is intrinsic religious motivation, conceptualized in direct dialectical contrast to extrinsic religious motivation. This motivational dichotomy represents distinct approaches to the meaning and functional utility of religious commitments within the overarching cognitive and emotional architecture of the individual.

Intrinsic Religious Orientation

The intrinsic dimension captures a motivational posture in which religion is experienced as an end in itself—an overarching, unifying master motive that integrates, directs, and contextualizes all other life pursuits. An individual exhibiting high intrinsic motivation internalizes theological principles into their central ego structure. Rather than compartmentalizing faith into periodic weekend observances or social engagements, the intrinsically motivated person attempts to harmonize vocational decisions, interpersonal relationships, ethical evaluations, and emotional responses with their ultimate spiritual worldview. Within the IRMS, this dimension is operationalized through statements reflecting complete devotion, constant spiritual consciousness, and moral surrender, as reflected in items such as “My faith involves all of my life” and “My religious beliefs are what really lie behind my whole approach to life.” Intrinsicness implies that existential values override immediate self-interest, convenience, and hedonistic pursuits.

Extrinsic Religious Orientation

Conversely, the extrinsic dimension captures a functional, instrumental, or utilitarian orientation toward faith. The extrinsically motivated individual approaches religious belief and institutional affiliation as a pragmatic vehicle to attain non-religious, worldly ends. These ends may encompass social status, fellowship, comfort during distress, the maintenance of family traditions, moral respectability, or business networking. Extrinsically oriented individuals tend to compartmentalize their religion, maintaining strict boundaries between sacred rituals and pragmatic, secular affairs. Within the construct space of the IRMS, extrinsic orientation is operationalized by an explicit reluctance to allow faith to govern pragmatic life choices, an insistence that external moral behaviors are independent of personal theological commitment, and the perception that secular priorities hold equal or superior status to transcendent obligations. Examples from the scale include “Although I am a religious person, I refuse to let religious considerations influence my everyday affairs” and “Although I believe in my religion, I feel there are many more important things in life.”

The Continuum Assumption: Bipolar vs. Orthogonal Construct Space

A critical psychometric characteristic of Hoge’s formulation is the conceptualization of intrinsic and extrinsic orientations as opposite poles of a single, continuous, bipolar dimension. Whereas earlier theorists—and subsequent contemporary psychometricians—frequently treat intrinsic and extrinsic orientations as two independent, orthogonal factors (allowing for categories such as “indiscriminately pro-religious” or “indiscriminately anti-religious”), Hoge constructed the IRMS under the operational premise that high intrinsicness inherently negates utilitarian instrumentalism. Grounded in Hunt and King’s formulation of the “ultimate versus instrumental” continuum, the IRMS was engineered using strict factor-analytic retention criteria to ensure that all selected items aligned along this single bipolar axis.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale is rooted in mid-twentieth-century personality theory and the empirical taxonomy of religious orientations formulated by Gordon W. Allport. In his seminal contributions to the study of prejudice and personality dynamics, Allport (1950, 1966) sought to explain a baffling empirical contradiction: while institutional religious doctrines uniformly advocate universal brotherhood, compassion, and charity, survey research consistently demonstrated that active churchgoers exhibited higher levels of racial prejudice, bigotry, and out-group hostility than non-attendees.

Allport’s Theoretical Dichotomy

To resolve this paradox, Allport and Ross (1967) proposed that researchers were aggregating psychologically distinct populations under a single behavioral category of “churchgoers.” They posited two primary orientations:

• The Extrinsic Orientation: Persons with this orientation “use” their religion. Faith provides utilitarian defense mechanisms, security, distraction, prestige, and social endorsement. The dogma is tailored to accommodate personal needs and existing societal prejudices. Consequently, extrinsic religion readily coexists with ethnocentrism, as both serve security and in-group boundary defense.
• The Intrinsic Orientation: Persons with this orientation “live” their religion. Finding their ultimate motive in spiritual transcendence, they subordinate personal desires, ego needs, and societal pressures to their theological precepts. Because these foundational doctrines typically emphasize universal human dignity, genuine intrinsicness theoretical acts as an antidote to prejudice.

The Hunt and King Revision

Despite the conceptual brilliance of the Allport-Ross model, their operationalization—the Religious Orientation Scale (ROS)—encountered severe psychometric critique. In an influential review, Hunt and King (1971) scrutinized the ROS and related instruments (such as Feagin, 1964), identifying significant psychometric weaknesses. Hunt and King noted that the ROS lacked factorial purity, that intrinsic and extrinsic items often yielded unstable cross-loadings, and that many items measured external religious behaviors, social conformity, or institutional compliance rather than internal motivation.

Hunt and King argued that if the construct was to retain theoretical utility, it must be cleanly distilled into a dimension reflecting ultimate versus instrumental valuation. They asserted that genuine intrinsicness represents viewing religious commitments as ultimate concerns (in the Paul Tillich theological tradition), whereas instrumentalism subordinates these commitments to mundane utility.

Hoge’s Methodological Synthesis

Hoge (1972) integrated these theoretical propositions by systematically building a scale anchored strictly in Hunt and King’s conceptualization. Hoge argued that previous scales failed to achieve psychometric unidimensionality because they conflated intrinsic motivation with orthodoxy, church attendance habits, dogmatism, and general moral conventionality. By isolating motivation from overt behavioral practice, Hoge sought to provide a reliable instrument to test core sociological hypotheses regarding the role of religion in modern secularized societies.

7. Validity

The validity of the Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale has been substantiated through extensive empirical scrutiny encompassing criterion-related, convergent, discriminant, and construct validation paradigms.

Criterion-Related (Known-Groups) Validity

In his original 1972 validation study, Hoge implemented a rigorous “known-groups” methodology designed to eliminate self-report circularity. Ecclesiastical leaders and pastors from diverse theological orientations were provided with detailed conceptual descriptions of intrinsic and extrinsic religious persons (without seeing the scale items themselves). These ministers were tasked with nominating adult parishioners who unequivocally exemplified either intrinsic devotion (living their faith as a master motive) or extrinsic association (participating primarily for social, familial, or instrumental reasons).

Hoge administered an initial pool of 30 candidate items to these nominated groups. Items were retained in the final scale only if they demonstrated high discriminatory power between the minister-designated intrinsic and extrinsic individuals. The resulting 10-item instrument correlated .59 with the ministers’ external judgments, establishing strong criterion validity based on independent, real-world behavioral evaluations.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Convergent validity was examined by cross-correlating the IRMS with preexisting measures of religious orientation. In comparative analyses conducted across university and community samples, the IRMS demonstrated strong positive correlations with the intrinsic subscale of the Allport-Ross (1967) Religious Orientation Scale and the Feagin (1964) intrinsic index, with correlation coefficients ranging from .71 to .87. While these elevated coefficients partially stem from shared thematic phrasing across classic items, factor analyses revealed that the IRMS exhibited cleaner primary loadings and fewer cross-loadings with social desirability markers than the ROS.

In addition, Hoge deliberately evaluated discriminant validity against theological orthodoxy and socio-demographic indicators. While related to traditional belief frameworks, the IRMS maintained sufficient empirical separation from strict dogmatism, confirming that it measures the psychological centrality of belief rather than mere compliance with standardized sectarian creeds.

Construct and Predictive Validity in Subsequent Research

Subsequent investigations across diverse behavioral contexts have established robust predictive validity for the IRMS:

• Altruism and Nonspontaneous Prosocial Behavior: Benson et al. (1980) investigated intrapersonal predictors of nonspontaneous helping behavior among 113 college students. Helping was operationalized as documented hours devoted over an entire year across 14 distinct categories (e.g., long-term volunteer tutoring, charitable solicitations, youth mentorship, hospital visitations). Benson et al. discovered that intrinsic religious motivation, as assessed by Hoge’s IRMS, emerged as one of the strongest positive predictors of sustained, nonspontaneous helping, successfully differentiating deep-seated altruistic commitment from situational, performative assistance.
• Coping with Severe Negative Life Events: In an influential series of clinical and community studies, Pargament et al. (1990) utilized Hoge’s motivational items to examine religious coping strategies in the aftermath of critical life traumas. The authors found that intrinsic motivation consistently predicted positive religious coping (e.g., benevolent religious reframing, seeking spiritual support from God), which in turn accounted for significant unique variance in psychological adjustment, subjective well-being, and post-crisis personal growth.
• Psychosocial Competence: Hathaway and Pargament (1990) applied covariance structure analysis (structural equation modeling) to evaluate the structural relations between intrinsic religiousness (measured via the IRMS), multidimensional religious coping, and broader psychosocial competence. Their findings revealed that intrinsic motivation functions as an antecedent resource that bolsters proactive problem-solving styles and reinforces ego resilience during acute life crises.
• Moral Judgment: Sapp and Jones (1986) evaluated the relationship between religious orientation and cognitive moral development utilizing Hoge’s instrument alongside measures of moral judgment, demonstrating how internalized faith interacts with ethical reasoning frameworks across development.

8. Reliability

The Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale demonstrates exemplary internal consistency across diverse populations, normative cross-sections, and clinical cohorts.

Internal Consistency Metrics

In the original psychometric validation study conducted by Hoge (1972), the internal consistency of the 10-item composite (with the three extrinsic items reverse-coded) was calculated using the Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 (KR-20), yielding a high reliability coefficient of .90. The item-to-item intercorrelations ranged from .13 to .72, confirming that while each item tapped unique experiential variance, they collectively converged upon a cohesive motivational construct. The average inter-item correlation was sufficiently strong to support unidimensional aggregation without problematic multi-collinearity or redundant item repetition.

Reliability of Abbreviated Forms

Subsequent psychometric evaluations have demonstrated that the scale retains solid internal consistency even when modified or condensed. Hoge and Carroll (1978), in their large-scale investigation of determinants of institutional commitment and financial stewardship across eight suburban Protestant congregations, deployed an abbreviated six-item version of the IRMS. Even with 40% of the items removed to optimize survey completion rates and prevent respondent fatigue, the scale yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of .84.

Normative Score Distributions and Variations

In Hoge’s (1972) second normative validation cohort, item-level and aggregate distribution characteristics were documented across known intrinsic and extrinsic groups. For the intrinsic item cluster, the normative mean item score was 2.00 with an average standard deviation of 1.07 (based on the original 1-to-4 scale where 1 represented high agreement). For the extrinsic item cluster, the normative mean item score was 4.11 with an average standard deviation of 1.08. When extrinsic items were appropriately reversed and aggregated with intrinsic items, the overall mean item score stabilized at 1.97 with an average standard deviation of 1.08, confirming standard distributional properties without ceiling or floor compressions in general religious samples.

9. Factor Analysis

A central design objective behind the construction of the IRMS was achieving structural parsimony and clear factor-analytic unidimensionality, an outcome that had eluded previous instruments such as the Allport-Ross Religious Orientation Scale and the Feagin inventory.

Initial Factor Selection and Extraction

Hoge subjected candidate items to exploratory factor analysis using principal components extraction followed by orthogonal rotations to isolate the core motivational substrate. While previous scales had exhibited fragmentation into secondary social components (e.g., Extrinsic-Social versus Extrinsic-Personal, as identified later by Kirkpatrick and Hood), Hoge intentionally eliminated items that loaded substantially onto secondary components or that demonstrated complex multi-factor allegiances.

The resulting 10 items were retained because they loaded cleanly onto a single primary factor that accounted for the major proportion of explained variance. All seven intrinsic items demonstrated strong, uniform positive loadings on this primary axis (conceptually reflecting total commitment, divine guidance, and transcendent purpose). The three extrinsic items displayed substantial negative loadings on this identical factor, thereby empirically validating Hoge’s theoretical assumption that intrinsic and extrinsic orientations can function as opposite anchors of a singular motivational continuum.

Subsequent Confirmatory Factor Structural Research

Subsequent structural modeling has supported the utility of Hoge’s items, though contemporary psychometricians have engaged in continuous debate regarding unidimensional versus two-dimensional specifications:

• Unidimensional Specification: When evaluated under a continuous bipolar model, confirmatory factor analyses generally yield satisfactory fit indices, provided error covariances between reverse-worded items are accounted for. In structural equation modeling conducted by Hathaway and Pargament (1990), Hoge’s intrinsic indicators formed a distinct, latent intrinsic factor demonstrating significant structural path coefficients to coping latent constructs, confirming the stability of the latent dimension across complex covariance matrices.
• Bifactor and Two-Factor Specifications: Some contemporary psychometricians suggest that the three extrinsic items, because they capture secular compartmentalization and utilitarianism, may form an independent latent factor if reverse-coding constraints are relaxed. Consequently, while Hoge envisioned a unidimensional measure, modern structural research often tests both a unidimensional model and an oblique two-factor model (separating the 7 intrinsic items from the 3 extrinsic items), with researchers selecting the structure that best fits their substantive analytic goals.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Self-report psychological scale / attitudinal assessment tool.
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (typically ages 16 and older) capable of self-reflective evaluation regarding existential, ethical, and spiritual orientations.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or digital survey interface; suitable for individual administration, large-scale survey research, and laboratory settings.
• Completion Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes.
• Item Count: 10 items (7 intrinsic items, 3 extrinsic items). An authentic 6-item short form is also utilized in organizational and sociological literature (Hoge & Carroll, 1978).
• Response Scale: 4-point Likert-type response format:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Moderately disagree
  • 3 = Moderately agree
  • 4 = Strongly agree
• Item Composition:
  • Intrinsic Items: Items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.
  • Extrinsic Items: Items 8, 9, and 10.
• Scoring Protocols:
  • Standard Hoge Scoring (Unidimensional Intrinsic Score): Reverse-score the three extrinsic items (Items 8, 9, and 10: 1 becomes 4, 2 becomes 3, 3 becomes 2, and 4 becomes 1). Sum or average all 10 items. Under modern forward-scoring conventions where 4 represents “strongly agree,” higher aggregated scores signify higher intrinsic religious motivation, whereas lower scores indicate extrinsic utilitarian orientation. (Note: In Hoge’s original 1972 coding, lower numerical values corresponded to agreement; modern scoring typically standardizes so that higher numbers reflect higher levels of the named construct).
  • Subscale Separation Method: Compute separate composite means for the 7 Intrinsic items (Items 1–7) and the 3 Extrinsic items (Items 8–10), allowing researchers to retain orthogonal intrinsic and extrinsic metrics (Spilka, 1977).
  • Isolated Intrinsic Method: Utilize only the 7 intrinsic items to establish an uncontaminated index of intrinsic orientation, frequently paired with independent dedicated extrinsic scales (Sapp & Jones, 1986).

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale was formally published in 1972 by Dean R. Hoge in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (Volume 11, Issue 4, pages 369–376). The scale items were published directly within the public academic domain in the primary research article to encourage widespread empirical adoption and quantitative verification across the social sciences.

As an academic instrument created for non-commercial research, the IRMS is widely accessible without licensing fees or commercial acquisition costs for scientific, scholarly, educational, and clinical research purposes. Formal academic citation of the original 1972 publication is standard practice when publishing findings derived from the instrument. Researchers intending to incorporate the instrument into commercial psychological assessment batteries, corporate evaluation frameworks, or revenue-generating digital applications should adhere to standard copyright policies governed by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) and the current publisher of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (Wiley-Blackwell).

12. References

• Allport, G. W. (1950). The individual and his religion: A psychological interpretation. Macmillan.
• Allport, G. W. (1966). The religious context of prejudice. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 5(3), 447–457. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384172
• Allport, G. W., & Ross, J. M. (1967). Personal religious orientation and prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5(4), 432–443. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0021212
• Benson, P. L., Dehority, J., Garman, L., Hanson, E., Hochschwender, M., Lebold, C., Rohr, R., & Sullivan, J. (1980). Intrapersonal correlates of nonspontaneous helping behavior. The Journal of Social Psychology, 110(1), 87–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1980.9924227
• Feagin, J. R. (1964). Prejudice and religious types: A focused study of southern fundamentalists. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 4(1), 3–13. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384478
• Hathaway, W. L., & Pargament, K. I. (1990). Intrinsic religiousness, religious coping, and psychosocial competence: A covariance structure analysis. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 29(4), 423–441. https://doi.org/10.2307/1387311
• Hoge, D. R. (1972). A validated intrinsic religious motivation scale. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 11(4), 369–376. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384677
• Hoge, D. R., & Carroll, J. W. (1978). Determinants of commitment and participation in suburban Protestant churches. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 17(2), 107–127. https://doi.org/10.2307/1386129
• Hunt, R. A., & King, M. B. (1971). The intrinsic-extrinsic concept: A review and evaluation. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 10(4), 339–356. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384780
• Pargament, K. I., Ensing, D. S., Falgout, K., Olsen, H., Reilly, B., Van Haitsma, K., & Warren, R. (1990). God help me: (I) Religious coping efforts as predictors of the outcomes to significant negative life events. American Journal of Community Psychology, 18(6), 793–824. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00938065
• Sapp, G. L., & Jones, L. (1986). Religious orientation and moral judgment. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 25(2), 208–214. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385477
• Spilka, B. (1977). Utilitarianism and personal faith. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 5(3), 226–233. https://doi.org/10.1177/009164717700500305

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)