Religiosity Scales

Abstract

The Religiosity Scales, originally formulated and psychometrically operationalized by sociologists Joseph E. Faulkner and Gordon F. DeJong (1965, 1966), represent one of the earliest and most influential multidimensional instruments designed to quantify individual religious involvement, belief, and practice. Developed to empirically test the pioneering theoretical taxonomy proposed by Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark (1965), the instrument departs from simplistic, unidimensional indices of religious commitment—such as denominational affiliation or church attendance frequency—by measuring religiosity across five distinct dimensions: Ideological (religious belief), Intellectual (religious knowledge and cognitive assent), Ritualistic (institutional and private religious practice), Experiential (subjective feeling and direct perception of divine contact), and Consequential (the secular manifestations and behavioral outcomes of religious commitment). Comprising 23 items configured with multiple-choice and Likert-type response formats, the scale was historically validated utilizing Guttman scalogram analysis, yielding high coefficients of reproducibility (ranging from .87 to .94 across subscales) and establishing significant inter-dimensional correlations. This article provides an exhaustive psychometric exposition of the Faulkner-DeJong Religiosity Scales, delineating their conceptual origins, construct operationalization, psychometric indices, structural factor debates, scoring mechanisms, and enduring utility within sociology of religion, psychology of religion, and cross-cultural social research.

Keywords

Religiosity Scales, Faulkner-DeJong Scale, 5-D Religiosity, multidimensional religiosity, Glock and Stark, ideological dimension, ritualistic dimension, experiential dimension, Guttman scaling, sociology of religion

Authors

The instrument was designed, operationalized, and validated by:

• Joseph E. Faulkner, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus of Sociology at The Pennsylvania State University, Department of Sociology, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States. Specialized in the sociology of religion, survey methodology, and social stratification.
• Gordon F. DeJong, Ph.D. — Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Demography at The Pennsylvania State University, Population Research Institute and Department of Sociology, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States. Renowned for structural demographic modeling, migration studies, and quantitative scale development.

Purpose

Throughout the early to mid-twentieth century, empirical investigations into human religiosity were severely constrained by an overreliance on crude, unidimensional metrics. Social scientists routinely operationalized religious commitment through single-variable proxies, such as formal denominational membership, stated religious preference, or the self-reported frequency of attendance at collective worship services. Such simplistic operationalizations failed to capture the multifaceted nature of human religious behavior. A person might attend church services regularly out of social compliance or familial tradition without endorsing core theological tenets, while another might maintain an intensely personal spiritual life and profound theological literacy while disengaging completely from formal ecclesiastical structures.

The primary purpose of the Faulkner-DeJong Religiosity Scales was to operationalize and empirically assess the five-dimensional model of religious commitment conceptualized by Glock and Stark (1965). Faulkner and DeJong sought to construct psychometrically defensible, cumulative subscales capable of answering three foundational questions in the social scientific study of religion:

1. Can distinct analytical dimensions of religiosity be operationalized into valid and reliable quantitative measurement subscales?
2. Do these dimensions constitute a single, overarching, generalized continuum of religious commitment, or do they function as mutually distinct, semi-autonomous domains?
3. What is the magnitude of empirical interrelationship among religious beliefs, knowledge, institutional rituals, personal subjective experiences, and everyday ethical conduct?

In clinical, counseling, and social psychological research settings, the Faulkner-DeJong instrument provides a nuanced diagnostic assessment of how religious identification influences psychosocial functioning, moral decision-making, physical and mental health outcomes, and cross-generational transmission of values. By isolating the five Glock-Stark dimensions, researchers can avoid confounding ritualistic participation with internal doctrinal conviction or experiential spirituality.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the instrument is multidimensional religiosity, defined as the constellation of cognitive beliefs, intellectual knowledge, overt institutional behaviors, subjective personal feelings, and secular moral consequences through which an individual relates to the sacred, transcendent, or divine. Faulkner and DeJong structured the instrument around five distinct sub-constructs:

1. Ideological Dimension (Religious Belief)

This subscale evaluates the degree of acceptance and subjective conviction regarding the core theological and cosmological tenets of traditional religious systems (primarily Judeo-Christian monotheism). The construct taps into fundamental doctrinal assertions, including the divine eschatological destiny of the cosmos, the personal and omniscient nature of God, divine intervention in human history, the necessity of personal repentance for sin, and the divine inspiration and authority of sacred scripture. High scores reflect an orthodox, dogmatic commitment to theistic metaphysics, whereas low scores reflect humanistic, deistic, or secular naturalist orientations.

2. Intellectual Dimension (Religious Knowledge and Cognitive Assent)

The intellectual dimension addresses the cognitive domain of religion, assessing both factual literacy regarding sacred texts and historical traditions, as well as the epistemological standing an individual accords to religious truth relative to scientific, empirical, or secular knowledge. It distinguishes between literalist theological comprehension and humanistic-historical interpretations, including knowledge of foundational canonical literature (such as identifying the four Gospels or the Pentateuch) and attitudes toward biblical miracles and divine creation.

3. Ritualistic Dimension (Religious Practice)

The ritualistic construct measures the behavioral, overt practices that individuals perform in devotion to their faith. Faulkner and DeJong operationalized this dimension across both institutional/public and private/devotional spheres. It quantifies the frequency of collective worship attendance, engagement in individual prayer and petition, devotion of personal time to reading scripture and theological literature, reliance on ecclesiastical authorities for major life transitions (such as marital ceremonies), and the degree to which an individual views the institutional church as indispensable for spiritual maturation.

4. Experiential Dimension (Religious Feeling)

This construct examines the subjective, affective, and phenomenological domain of religious life. It assesses personal, direct experiences of the sacred, encompassing profound feelings of closeness or mystical “union” with God, the subjective perception of existential purpose directly mediated through religious commitment, emotional comfort and security when confronting the inevitability of physical mortality, and an epistemic intuition that transcending human rationalism is essential to understanding reality.

5. Consequential Dimension (Secular Effects)

The consequential construct assesses the behavioral manifestations, moral attitudes, and secular judgments that flow outward from religious convictions into civil, ethical, and interpersonal domains. Unlike internal beliefs or liturgical rituals, the consequential dimension evaluates how an individual’s religiosity informs attitudes toward civil legislation (e.g., Sunday blue laws), interpersonal sexual ethics (e.g., premarital intimacy among active church members), political candidate evaluation based on church affiliation, and conscientious honesty in civil civic responsibilities (such as taxation ethics).

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Faulkner-DeJong Religiosity Scales rests upon the multidimensional taxonomy formulated by Charles Y. Glock (1962) and expanded by Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark in their seminal text Religion and Society in Tension (1965). Glock and Stark argued that across world religions, religious commitment manifests through universal human modalities:

• Ideological: What the adherent believes.
• Intellectual: What the adherent knows and how they cognitively process theological claims.
• Ritualistic: What the adherent does in terms of worship, rites, and formal observances.
• Experiential: What the adherent feels emotionally and intuitively regarding the divine.
• Consequential: How the adherent behaves in social and secular life as a result of faith.

Prior to Faulkner and DeJong’s work, this framework remained an unverified conceptual taxonomy. Faulkner and DeJong provided the first systematic psychometric translation of Glock’s five dimensions into standardized psychometric items. They embedded their empirical validation within Louis Guttman’s scalogram theory. Guttman scaling assumes that a unidimensional construct can be measured by a series of cumulative, hierarchically ordered items, such that an individual who endorses an item of high difficulty or intensity will necessarily endorse all items of lesser intensity.

Faulkner and DeJong hypothesized that if each of the five Glock dimensions formed a legitimate Guttman scale, this would provide empirical proof that each dimension possessed internal cumulative validity. Furthermore, by calculating intercorrelations among the five separate scales, they sought to determine whether religiosity is ultimately a single general factor (G-factor) with specialized facets or a collection of functionally independent sociological constructs.

Validity

The construct, content, and criterion validity of the Faulkner-DeJong Religiosity Scales were established through extensive sociological field testing, primarily involving a foundational sample of university undergraduates (N = 362) at The Pennsylvania State University, followed by replication studies across diverse demographic cohorts:

Content and Construct Validity

Content validity was ensured by deriving all candidate questionnaire items directly from classical Christian and Judeo-Christian doctrinal benchmarks and the explicit conceptual parameters published by Glock (1962). Theological experts, sociologists, and psychometricians reviewed the initial item pool to eliminate ambiguous wording, ensure theological coverage across major denominational traditions, and verify that items reflected differing gradations of religious conservatism and devotion.

Guttman Scalogram Validity Indices

To confirm that each subscale conformed to cumulative scalogram criteria, Faulkner and DeJong calculated the Coefficient of Reproducibility (CR), where a value of .90 or greater conventionally signifies a valid, unidimensional Guttman scale. They also evaluated the Minimal Marginal Reproducibility (MMR) and the Coefficient of Scalability (CS) (Menzel, 1953), which measures the degree to which reproducibility is not merely an artifact of extreme marginal frequencies (with .60 or .65 considered the benchmark for acceptable scalability):

• Ideological Scale: CR = .923; MMR = .691; CS = .751. These values confirmed strong unidimensionality and cumulative ordering of doctrinal conviction.
• Intellectual Scale: CR = .881; MMR = .680; CS = .628. Although slightly below the rigid .90 CR threshold, it demonstrated acceptable scalability for cognitive knowledge.
• Ritualistic Scale: CR = .944; MMR = .642; CS = .844. This dimension yielded the highest internal cumulative structure among all five scales.
• Experiential Scale: CR = .915; MMR = .673; CS = .740. Confirmed robust cumulative structure for emotional and transcendent perceptions.
• Consequential Scale: CR = .870; MMR = .640; CS = .639. Conformed moderately well to scalability, reflecting the inherent complexity of translating religious values into varied social circumstances.

Convergent and Inter-Dimensional Relationships

Inter-dimensional correlation analysis revealed substantial associations among the Ideological, Ritualistic, Experiential, and Intellectual dimensions (Pearson r values ranging between .45 and .78), demonstrating high convergent validity across the core core religious domains. However, the Consequential dimension exhibited markedly lower correlations with the other four scales (correlations ranging from .21 to .39). This divergence provided critical discriminant validity, demonstrating empirically that knowing what a person believes or how often they pray does not directly dictate how they navigate civil, political, or secular moral choices.

Reliability

Reliability for cumulative scales developed during the classical test theory era was primarily evaluated via scalogram reproducibility indices and item consistency metrics:

• Reproducibility as Internal Consistency: In Guttman scaling methodology, a high Coefficient of Reproducibility directly reflects the internal consistency and predictive fidelity of the scale items. Because the CR values for the Ideological (.92), Ritualistic (.94), and Experiential (.92) scales exceed .90, an individual’s overall scale score allows researchers to reproduce their specific responses to individual items with greater than 90% accuracy.
• Cronbach’s Alpha Estimates: Subsequent re-analyses of the Faulkner-DeJong items as continuous Likert-type scales (e.g., Robinson & Shaver, 1969; DeJong, Faulkner, & Warland, 1976) demonstrated robust internal consistency reliability coefficients:
  • Ideological Subscale: Cronbach’s α = .83 to .89
  • Ritualistic Subscale: Cronbach’s α = .81 to .87
  • Experiential Subscale: Cronbach’s α = .78 to .84
  • Intellectual Subscale: Cronbach’s α = .71 to .76
  • Consequential Subscale: Cronbach’s α = .62 to .68
• Stability (Test-Retest): Longitudinal and cross-sectional testing across university student samples over academic intervals indicated temporal stability coefficients ranging from r = .79 to .86 over an 8-to-12-week test-retest period, confirming that core religiosity dimensions represent stable dispositional orientations rather than transient affective states.

Factor Analysis

The internal dimensionality of the Faulkner-DeJong scale has served as a benchmark case in psychometric debates regarding the structural independence of religious dimensions. In their initial 1966 publication, Faulkner and DeJong observed that while each scale functioned as an acceptable quasi-Guttman scale individually, the high intercorrelations among the Ideological, Intellectual, Ritualistic, and Experiential scales pointed toward an underlying general religiosity factor.

Exploratory Factor Analytic Findings

In a landmark cross-cultural re-evaluation, DeJong, Faulkner, and Warland (1976) subjected the 23 items to exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using principal axis factoring with orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations across American and international student samples:

• Extraction of a Dominant Core Factor: Without rotation, a strong first unrotated principal factor emerged, accounting for between 38% and 46% of the total item variance. The Ideological and Ritualistic items loaded most heavily on this general factor (λ = .65 to .84), confirming that personal doctrinal belief and behavioral worship represent the unified core of traditional religiosity.
• Multi-Factor Resolution: Following oblique rotation, four to five distinct factors emerged, corresponding closely to Glock’s conceptual taxonomy:
  1. Factor 1 (Belief / Ideology): Dominated by items evaluating biblical authority, God’s historical action, and traditional theistic metaphysics (λ = .61 to .81).
  2. Factor 2 (Ritual / Practice): Defined by church attendance, prayer frequency, and scripture reading (λ = .58 to .86).
  3. Factor 3 (Experience): Characterized by personal feelings of proximity to the divine and existential security (λ = .52 to .79).
  4. Factor 4 (Intellectual / Knowledge): Grouped items addressing Genesis, miracles, and religious versus scientific truth claims (λ = .44 to .73).
  5. Factor 5 (Consequential): Separated into an independent, weak moralism factor (λ = .36 to .62), showing minimal structural cross-loading onto the core belief dimension.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Considerations

Subsequent modern psychometric evaluations utilizing Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) have demonstrated that a hierarchical (bifactor or higher-order) structural equation model exhibits superior fit indices (e.g., CFI > .92, RMSEA < .06) compared to a strict orthogonal five-factor model. In this hierarchical structure, a broad higher-order "General Religiosity" construct accounts for the covariance among the first-order Ideological, Ritualistic, Experiential, and Intellectual dimensions, while the Consequential dimension remains largely orthogonal or linked via secondary paths.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Faulkner-DeJong 5-D Religiosity Scale (Religiosity Scales).
• Authors: Joseph E. Faulkner and Gordon F. DeJong (1965, 1966).
• Construct Measured: Multidimensional Religiosity across Glock’s five domains (Ideological, Intellectual, Ritualistic, Experiential, Consequential).
• Test Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or digital questionnaire.
• Item Count: 23 items distributed across five subscales:
  • Ideological Subscale: 5 items
  • Intellectual Subscale: 4 items
  • Ritualistic Subscale: 5 items
  • Experiential Subscale: 5 items
  • Consequential Subscale: 4 items
• Response Formats: Categorical multiple-choice options, ordered polychotomous categories, and Likert-type agreement options tailored to each specific query (e.g., Yes/Uncertain/No; Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree; Frequency options).
• Scoring Methodology:
  • Traditional Guttman Scalogram Scoring: Items within each subscale are dichotomized into “scale-type” responses (reflecting high religious commitment vs. non-committed) based on empirical cutoffs, assigning participants an ordinal score from 0 to the maximum number of items in that subscale.
  • Summative Likert Scoring: Modern survey adaptations assign numerical values (e.g., 1 to 3, 1 to 4, or 1 to 5) to ordered responses, where higher values indicate greater traditional religious commitment. Subscale scores are obtained by summing or averaging item responses within each dimension. Total scale scores range from 23 to 95+ depending on the specific response metric utilized.
• Target Population: Adolescents, university students, and adult populations across monotheistic cultural contexts (specifically tailored for Christian and Judeo-Christian demographic groups).
• Completion Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Faulkner-DeJong Religiosity Scales were developed in 1965 and published formally in the peer-reviewed journal Social Forces in December 1966 (Faulkner & DeJong, 1966). As an academic instrument published in public scholarly literature and documented in foundational survey handbooks (e.g., Robinson & Shaver’s Measures of Social Psychological Attitudes, 1969), the scale is in the public domain for non-commercial academic, psychological, and clinical research purposes. No licensing fee or formal permission is required for non-profit academic research, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to Faulkner and DeJong (1966) and Glock and Stark (1965). Researchers seeking to adapt items for commercial diagnostic assessments or proprietary electronic testing platforms should consult the original copyright holders and academic publishers.

References

• DeJong, G. F., Faulkner, J. E., & Warland, R. H. (1976). Dimensions of religiosity reconsidered: Evidence from a cross-cultural study. Social Forces, 54(4), 866–889. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/54.4.866
• Faulkner, J. E., & DeJong, G. F. (1965). Religiosity in 5-D: An empirical analysis. Paper presented at the American Sociological Association Convention, Chicago, IL.
• Faulkner, J. E., & DeJong, G. F. (1966). Religiosity in 5-D: An empirical analysis. Social Forces, 45(2), 246–254. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/45.2.246
• Glock, C. Y. (1962). On the study of religious commitment. Religious Education, 57(4), 98–110. https://doi.org/10.1080/0034408620570407
• Glock, C. Y., & Stark, R. (1965). Religion and society in tension. Rand McNally.
• Menzel, H. (1953). A new coefficient for scalogram analysis. Public Opinion Quarterly, 17(2), 268–280. https://doi.org/10.1086/266453
• Robinson, J. P., & Shaver, P. R. (1969). Measures of social psychological attitudes. Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)