Quest Scale

Abstract

The Quest Scale is an established self-report psychometric instrument designed to assess a process-oriented, open-ended approach to religious and existential questions. Developed by social psychologists C. Daniel Batson and Patricia A. Schoenrade, the scale operationalizes the “quest” religious orientation—a construct initially introduced to address limitations in Gordon Allport’s classic dichotomy of intrinsic versus extrinsic religiosity. While early empirical investigations utilized a six-item “Interactional” scale that suffered from low internal consistency (Cronbach’s α hovering around .45 to .50), Batson and Schoenrade formulated the definitive 12-item Quest Scale to provide a psychometrically robust measurement tool. The scale evaluates three interrelated conceptual facets: (a) readiness to face existential questions without reducing their complexity, (b) self-criticism and perceptions of religious doubts as positive, and (c) openness to change in religious convictions. Responses are captured on a 9-point Likert-type continuum ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 9 (Strongly Agree), yielding continuous mean composite scores. Across diverse empirical investigations, the 12-item instrument has demonstrated improved internal reliability (α = .75 to .81) and two-week test-retest stability (r = .79). Extensive construct, convergent, and discriminant validity studies confirm that quest religiosity is distinct from orthodox intrinsic commitment, extrinsic social utility, secular agnosticism, and religious distress, functioning as a unique predictor of cognitive complexity, low racial and social prejudice, and universal prosocial motivation.

Keywords

Quest Scale, C. Daniel Batson, religious orientation, existential doubt, openness to change, intrinsic religiosity, extrinsic religiosity, psychometrics, cognitive complexity, prejudice reduction, religious psychology, scale validation

Authors

The Quest Scale was conceived and refined by:

• C. Daniel Batson, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Kansas. Batson is an internationally renowned social psychologist recognized for his pioneering empirical work on the empathy-altruism hypothesis, prosocial behavior, and the multidimensional measurement of religious motivation.
• Patricia A. Schoenrade, Ph.D. — Professor Emerita of Psychology at William Jewell College. Schoenrade collaborated extensively with Batson on the psychometric refinement of religious orientation constructs, addressing measurement error, structural validity, and empirical critiques of religious questing.

Early theoretical conceptualizations were developed alongside W. Larry Ventis, Ph.D. (College of William & Mary), co-author of foundational monographs on the social psychology of religious experience.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Quest Scale is to capture an open, questioning, and self-critical approach to religion and existential meaning. For decades, empirical research in the psychology of religion was dominated by Gordon W. Allport and J. Michael Ross’s (1967) bi-dimensional model, which contrasted extrinsic religiosity (using religion as a means to self-serving ends such as social status or security) with intrinsic religiosity (living religion as an end in itself, characterized by internalized faith and master motivation). However, Batson observed a persistent empirical paradox: intrinsic religiosity, theoretically conceived as mature and compassionate, frequently correlated with subtle prejudice, dogmatism, rigid adherence to social convention, and intolerance of ambiguity.

Batson argued that Allport’s conceptualization of “mature” religion had been improperly narrowed in the Religious Orientation Scale (ROS) to represent rigid, uncritical orthodoxy. To restore the dimension of honest inquiry, intellectual humility, and existential confrontation, Batson introduced “quest” (initially termed the interactional dimension). The Quest Scale was designed to measure:

• The degree to which an individual views religious and existential questions as an ongoing journey rather than a closed set of dogmatic answers.
• The valuation of doubt, uncertainty, and cognitive tension as constructive catalysts for personal and spiritual growth.
• The willingness to modify core worldview assumptions when confronted with contradictory life experiences or new evidence.

In clinical, counseling, and developmental contexts, the Quest Scale serves as an invaluable diagnostic and research tool for assessing religious deconstruction, spiritual struggle, cognitive openness, and the developmental maturation of personal faith systems. In social psychological research, it provides a crucial metric for examining how different styles of religious processing influence intergroup attitudes, tolerance, universal altruism, and resistance to authoritarianism.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct of religion as quest involves an active, ongoing search for truth that acknowledges the inherent complexity and tragedy of human existence. Rather than offering defensive psychological comfort or rigid closure, quest religiosity represents an open-ended, inquiring stance. Batson and Schoenrade (1991b) delineate three distinct yet interrelated facets that constitute this multidimensional construct:

1. Readiness to Face Existential Questions Without Reducing Their Complexity

This facet assesses an individual’s willingness to confront existential enigmas—such as suffering, death, purpose, and cosmic injustice—without relying on oversimplified, pre-packaged theological dogmas. High scorers do not evade existential angst; rather, their awareness of global and personal tensions actively drives their spiritual inquiry. For instance, Item 2 (“I have been driven to ask religious questions out of a growing awareness of the tensions in my world and in my relation to my world“) operationalizes this tension-driven search. Faith is not treated as an intellectual narcotic to relieve existential dread, but as a framework for engaging reality in all its multifaceted ambiguity.

2. Self-Criticism and Perceptions of Religious Doubt as Positive

Conventional religious frameworks often view religious doubt as sinful, spiritually dangerous, or indicative of weak moral resolve. In stark contrast, the quest orientation posits that self-critical appraisal and doubt are essential, healthy, and constructive components of genuine faith. Doubt is not regarded as an unsettling deficiency to be suppressed, but as a vital safeguard against dogmatism, fanaticism, and self-deception. As exemplified by Item 6 (“For me, doubting is an important part of what it means to be religious“), uncertainty is normalized and actively valued within the individual’s spiritual matrix.

3. Openness to Change

The third facet captures the dynamic, developmental nature of the individual’s worldview. Individuals high in quest recognize that personal growth, intellectual development, and experiential changes inevitably necessitate revisions to one’s religious convictions. Convictions are held tentatively rather than absolutistically. This is reflected in Item 9 (“As I grow and change, I expect my religion also to grow and change“), which affirms that religious understanding is an evolving, lifelong process rather than a static, immutable fortress of belief.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical roots of the Quest Scale lie at the intersection of existential psychology, cognitive developmental theory, and social psychological models of motivated cognition.

Allport’s Mature Religion and the Interactional Model

In The Individual and His Religion (1950), Gordon Allport theorized that “mature religious sentiment” is characterized by critical self-reflection, tolerance of ambiguity, and a provisional, exploratory quality. However, when Allport and Ross (1967) published the Religious Orientation Scale, their operationalization of intrinsic religiosity primarily captured intense personal devotion and theological orthodoxy, inadvertently omitting the open-ended, inquiring qualities Allport had originally described. Batson (1976) sought to recover this lost dimension by formulating a three-dimensional model of religious orientation:

1. Religion as Means (Extrinsic): Utilizing religion for external gain, solace, or social belonging.
2. Religion as End (Intrinsic): Devoting oneself completely to internalized dogma and divine command.
3. Religion as Quest (Interactional): Approaching existential questions with open-ended curiosity, embracing doubt, and resisting institutional closure.

Cognitive Developmental and Existential Underpinnings

The quest construct strongly resonates with James Fowler’s stages of faith development, particularly Stage 4 (Individuative-Reflective Faith) and Stage 5 (Conjunctive Faith), wherein the individual deconstructs inherited religious myths, confronts paradox, and becomes open to truths from alternative traditions. Furthermore, it draws upon existential philosophy (Paul Tillich, Søren Kierkegaard, and Viktor Frankl), which posits that authentic existence requires honest confrontation with the human condition rather than defensive evasion through dogmatic certainty.

Validity

The construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the 12-item Quest Scale have been rigorously evaluated across decades of empirical research.

Construct and Discriminant Validity

Early critics argued that quest religiosity might simply represent agnosticism, religious apostasy, or spiritual conflict (Donahue, 1985; Hood & Morris, 1985). However, empirical investigations by Burris, Jackson, Tarpley, and Smith (1996) decisively refuted this conflation. Burris et al. demonstrated that individuals categorizing their affiliation as “personal religion” scored significantly higher on the Quest Scale than self-identified atheists, agnostics, or liberal Protestants. Furthermore, Quest scores do not correlate strongly with general neuroticism, existential depression, or chronic anxiety, establishing that questing reflects a constructive, self-directed search for meaning rather than psychological maladjustment (Kojetin et al., 1987).

Factor analytic and correlational data confirm that Quest is empirically distinct from both the Allport-Ross Extrinsic and Intrinsic scales (Batson & Schoenrade, 1991a; Batson et al., 1993). In a canonical correlation analysis, Batson and Schoenrade demonstrated that while the Intrinsic scale correlates heavily with doctrinal orthodoxy and social desirability, the Quest Scale shows near-zero correlations with orthodoxy and negative correlations with dogmatism and authoritarianism.

Convergent Validity

The Quest Scale correlates positively with several well-established cognitive and personality measures:

• Cognitive Complexity: Batson and Raynor-Prince (1983) found that individuals scoring high on Quest demonstrated significantly higher levels of conceptual complexity when reasoning about existential and moral dilemmas.
• Openness to Experience: In personality research utilizing the Big Five framework, Quest consistently displays robust positive associations with Openness to Experience (intellect and artistic/philosophical curiosity).
• Autonomy and Individuation: Burris et al. (1996) reported positive relationships between Quest scores and psychological reactance, social criticism, and the need for uniqueness, aligning with the theoretical profile of an individuated spiritual stance.

Predictive and Behavioral Validity

The most compelling evidence for the validity of the Quest Scale emerges from behavioral experiments on prejudice and altruism:

• Prejudice Reduction: While intrinsic religiosity frequently predicts reduced overt prejudice but persistent covert or symbolic prejudice, Quest consistently predicts lower levels of both overt and covert racial prejudice, homophobia, and outgroup derogation (Batson, Burris, & Oleson, 1994; Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992).
• Altruistic Prosocial Motivation: In controlled laboratory paradigms assessing helping behavior, Batson et al. (1989) demonstrated that individuals high in Quest were uniquely responsive to the actual needs and desires of the victim, rather than forcing unwanted assistance merely to alleviate their own distress or fulfill a moral rule.

Reliability

The psychometric development of the 12-item Quest Scale was expressly motivated by the internal consistency shortcomings of Batson’s earlier 6-item Interactional Scale. In their extensive meta-review, Batson and Schoenrade (1991b) noted that the 6-item scale exhibited an average Cronbach’s alpha of only .45 to .50 across multiple independent studies.

Internal Consistency

By expanding the instrument to 12 items (four items per conceptual facet) and refining item wording, Batson and Schoenrade (1991b) achieved substantially higher reliability coefficients:

• Sample 1 (N = 200 Christian-background undergraduates): Cronbach’s α = .75.
• Sample 2 (N = 208 Christian-background undergraduates): Cronbach’s α = .81.

Subsequent independent validation studies have confirmed these values. For example, Burris, Jackson, Tarpley, and Smith (1996) reported internal consistency coefficients ranging between α = .71 and .80 across four diverse university samples. These values are considered thoroughly adequate for research purposes involving continuous group-level comparisons.

Temporal Stability (Test-Retest Reliability)

Because the quest orientation explicitly measures “openness to change,” critics questioned whether the construct possessed sufficient temporal stability to be considered an enduring religious orientation. Burris and Tarpley reported a two-week test-retest reliability coefficient of r = .79 (p < .001) in a sample of 61 undergraduate participants. This compares very favorably to the .63 test-retest coefficient observed for the earlier 6-item version, indicating that while high-quest individuals anticipate future change in their specific theological views, their underlying orientation toward questioning and doubt is a stable trait-like disposition over time.

Factor Analysis

The structural composition of the Quest Scale has been extensively examined via exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Batson and Schoenrade (1991b) designed the scale around three conceptual facets. In principal-components analysis with oblique rotation, items generally load onto three correlated factors corresponding to these conceptual domains:

1. Facing Existential Questions (Items 1, 2, 3, 4): Item loadings on this factor range from .52 to .78, capturing the tension-driven initiation of religious reflection.
2. Doubts as Positive (Items 5, 6, 7, 8): Item loadings range from .48 to .82, with Item 7 loading negatively prior to reverse scoring.
3. Openness to Change (Items 9, 10, 11, 12): Item loadings range from .46 to .79, reflecting dynamic belief modification over time.

Importantly, when the Quest Scale is factor-analyzed alongside the Allport-Ross Extrinsic and Intrinsic scales in a higher-order principal components analysis, the 12 items coalesce to define an independent Quest Component with factor loadings of .95 and .97 across validation samples (Batson & Schoenrade, 1991b), demonstrating remarkable discriminant structural purity relative to Means and End dimensions.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Structural equation modeling studies evaluating the 12-item scale have compared a single-factor unidimensional model against a three-factor correlated model. While the three-factor model consistently yields superior fit indices (e.g., CFI > .92, RMSEA ≈ .055, SRMR ≈ .048), the inter-factor correlations between the three latent dimensions are substantial (typically r = .45 to .68). Consequently, Batson and Schoenrade explicitly recommend treating the 12-item instrument primarily as a single, unidimensional composite score rather than calculating separate, isolated subscale scores.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Quest Scale
• Alternative Names: 12-Item Quest Scale; Batson-Schoenrade Quest Scale
• Authors: C. Daniel Batson & Patricia A. Schoenrade (1991)
• Construct Measured: Religion as quest (existential inquiry, valuation of doubt, and openness to religious change)
• Format: Self-administered psychological questionnaire
• Number of Items: 12 items
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes
• Target Population: Older adolescents (ages 16+) and adults across varied religious and secular backgrounds
• Response Continuum: 9-point Likert-type scale
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Moderately Disagree
  • 4 = Slightly Disagree
  • 5 = Neither Agree nor Disagree (Neutral)
  • 6 = Slightly Agree
  • 7 = Moderately Agree
  • 8 = Agree
  • 9 = Strongly Agree
• Reverse-Scored Items: Items 7 and 11 must be reverse scored before calculating composite scores (i.e., 1 → 9, 2 → 8, 3 → 7, 4 → 6, 5 → 5, 6 → 4, 7 → 3, 8 → 2, 9 → 1).
  • Formula: Reversed Score = 10 − Raw Score
• Scoring and Interpretation:
  • Overall Quest Score: Calculated as the mean across all 12 items (Range: 1.00 to 9.00). Alternatively, a sum score (Range: 12 to 108) may be reported, though item means are standard in published literature.
  • Subscale Mean Scores (Optional/Exploratory):
    • Readiness to face existential questions: Mean of Items 1, 2, 3, and 4.
    • Self-criticism and doubt as positive: Mean of Items 5, 6, 7 (reversed), and 8.
    • Openness to change: Mean of Items 9, 10, 11 (reversed), and 12.
  • Normative Reference Points: In collegiate Christian-background samples, Batson and Schoenrade (1991b) reported baseline sample means of 5.04 (SD ≈ 1.25) and 4.95 (SD ≈ 1.30). Scores above 6.0 denote high quest orientation; scores below 4.0 denote low quest orientation.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The 12-item Quest Scale was formally published in 1991 by C. Daniel Batson and Patricia A. Schoenrade in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. As an academic assessment tool published in peer-reviewed scientific literature, the instrument is available in the public domain for non-commercial educational, clinical, and scholarly research purposes without payment of licensing fees. Proper attribution and formal citation of the authors’ original validation articles (Batson & Schoenrade, 1991a, 1991b) are required when administering, analyzing, or reporting data derived from this scale.

References

• Allport, G. W. (1950). The individual and his religion: A psychological interpretation. Macmillan.
• 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
• Altemeyer, B., & Hunsberger, B. (1992). Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, quest, and prejudice. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2(2), 113–133. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327582ijpr0202_5
• Batson, C. D. (1976). Religion as prosocial: Agent or double agent? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 15(1), 29–45. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384312
• Batson, C. D., & Burris, C. T. (1994). Personal religion: Depressant or stimulant of prejudice and discrimination? In M. P. Zanna & J. M. Olson (Eds.), The psychology of prejudice: The Ontario symposium (Vol. 7, pp. 149–169). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Batson, C. D., Oleson, K. C., Weeks, J. L., Healy, S. P., Reeves, P. J., Jennings, P., & Brown, T. (1989). Religious prosocial motivation: Is it altruistic or egoistic? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(5), 873–884. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.5.873
• Batson, C. D., & Raynor-Prince, L. (1983). Religious orientation and complexity of thought about existential concerns. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 22(1), 38–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385590
• Batson, C. D., & Schoenrade, P. A. (1991a). Measuring religion as quest: 1. Validity concerns. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 30(4), 416–429. https://doi.org/10.2307/1387277
• Batson, C. D., & Schoenrade, P. A. (1991b). Measuring religion as quest: 2. Reliability concerns. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 30(4), 430–447. https://doi.org/10.2307/1387278
• Batson, C. D., Schoenrade, P., & Ventis, W. L. (1993). Religion and the individual: A social-psychological perspective. Oxford University Press.
• Batson, C. D., & Ventis, W. L. (1982). The religious experience: A social-psychological perspective. Oxford University Press.
• Burris, C. T., Jackson, L. M., Tarpley, W. R., & Smith, G. (1996). Religion as quest: The self-directed pursuit of meaning. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22(10), 1068–1076. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672962210009
• Burris, C. T., & Tarpley, W. R. (1998). Religion as being: Preliminary validation of the Immanence Scale. Journal of Research in Personality, 32(1), 55–79. https://doi.org/10.1006/jrpe.1997.2201
• Donahue, M. J. (1985). Intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness: Review and meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48(2), 400–419. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.48.2.400
• Hood, R. W., Jr., & Morris, R. J. (1985). Conceptualization of quest: A critical rejoinder to Batson. Review of Religious Research, 26(4), 391–397. https://doi.org/10.2307/3511054
• Kojetin, B. A., McIntosh, D. N., Bridges, R. A., & Spilka, B. (1987). Quest: Constructive search or religious conflict? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 26(1), 111–115. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385845
• McFarland, S. G., & Warren, J. C., Jr. (1992). Religious orientation and selective exposure among fundamentalist Christians. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 31(2), 163–174. https://doi.org/10.2307/1387006

Items of the Scale