Religious Attitude Inventory

Abstract

The Religious Attitude Inventory (RAI) is a classical psychometric instrument developed by David P. Ausubel and Seymour H. Schpoont (1957) to assess the intensity and extremeness of an individual’s religious attitudes along a bipolar continuum ranging from strict orthodoxy to radical nonconformism. Designed to quantify religious attitude extremity within four interrelated theological and institutional domains—specifically God, immortality, religious doctrine, and the church—the scale operates on the foundational premise that extreme ideological attitudes are intimately linked to psychological ego-involvement. The inventory consists of 50 self-administered items, systematically divided into 25 orthodox (traditionally positive) statements and 25 nonconformist (critically negative or secular) statements. Responses are recorded on a five-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (Strongly agree) to 5 (Strongly disagree). After reverse-scoring nonconformist items, aggregate scores span from 50 (extreme nonconformity/secularism) to 250 (extreme orthodoxy/traditionalism), with a midpoint of 150 reflecting neutrality.

Psychometrically, the RAI demonstrates exceptional internal consistency, with initial split-half reliability coefficients reaching r = .97 (corrected via the Spearman–Brown formula) in educational samples, and subsequent independent replications confirming a reliability coefficient of .96 (Foy et al., 1976). Construct and criterion-related validity are substantiated by the inventory’s proven capacity to statistically differentiate between known groups of orthodox, neutral, and nonconformist participants (p < .01), high correlations with behavioral indices of religious practice (r = .73), and replication of established sociological patterns regarding gender differences in religious sentiment. The RAI remains an influential instrument for social psychologists, sociologists of religion, and clinical researchers examining belief systems, ideological rigidity, and religious value orientations.

Keywords

Religious Attitude Inventory, David P. Ausubel, religious orthodoxy, nonconformism, ego-involvement, psychometrics, attitude measurement, religious beliefs, scale validation, secularism

Authors

The Religious Attitude Inventory was originally conceived, constructed, and validated by:

• David Paul Ausubel, M.D., Ph.D. (1918–2008): Prominent American psychologist and educational theorist who served as Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later at the City University of New York (CUNY). Dr. Ausubel is widely renowned for his cognitive learning theory, the concept of meaningful learning, and extensive research on ego development, social attitudes, and cognitive structures.
• Seymour H. Schpoont, Ph.D.: Research psychologist and collaborator at the Bureau of Educational Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose empirical work focused on the measurement of social attitudes, ideological polarization, and group opinion prediction.

Subsequent psychometric evaluations, factor analyses, and normative investigations were conducted by Donald W. Foy, John D. Lowe Jr., Louise K. Hildman, and Keith W. Jacobs (1976) at the University of Southern Mississippi, as well as inclusion in the classic compendium by Marvin E. Shaw and Jack M. Wright (1967).

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Religious Attitude Inventory is to provide a standardized, objective measure of the intensity, polarity, and extremeness of an individual’s religious orientation. Rather than restricting assessment to a single denominational perspective (such as Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, or Judaism), the scale evaluates core trans-denominational constructs of Western theism and organized religion. By operationalizing religious sentiment along a spectrum from extreme traditional orthodoxy to extreme secular nonconformism, the RAI assesses not merely the content of an individual’s beliefs, but the psychological conviction and ego-involvement supporting those beliefs.

In research contexts, the instrument serves as an essential tool for social, personality, and political psychologists examining ideological alignment, dogmatism, social conservatism, and cognitive dissonance. Because religious beliefs frequently serve as core anchoring points for an individual’s worldview, the RAI allows investigators to measure how strongly religious attitudes influence socio-political judgment, interpersonal perception, and group conformity. For instance, the original research by Ausubel and Schpoont (1957) employed the instrument to test whether individuals holding extreme religious attitudes (either orthodox or nonconformist) exhibited greater or lesser accuracy in predicting majority group opinions compared to individuals with moderate or neutral attitudes.

In applied and clinical settings, the inventory has been utilized to examine counseling dynamics, specifically how value congruence or divergence between psychotherapists and clients influences the therapeutic alliance, empathy perception, and client outcome evaluations (Wyatt & Johnson, 1990). Furthermore, educational and developmental researchers have used the RAI to assess religious attitude change across academic cohorts and to explore personality correlates associated with religious conversion, deconstruction, or secularization (Dolby et al., 1968).

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the Religious Attitude Inventory is religious attitude extremeness, conceptualized as a bipolar continuum ranging from traditional orthodoxy to secular nonconformism, characterized by high levels of ego-involvement. The scale measures attitude valence across four fundamental theological and institutional dimensions:

1. The Nature and Existence of God

This dimension evaluates the degree to which an individual conceptualizes God as an omnipotent, personal, and active creator who intervenes in human history, answers personal supplications, and governs universal order. The orthodox pole is characterized by the affirmation of divine teleology, biblical literalism regarding creation, and personal communion through prayer (e.g., Item 1: “God made everything-the stars, the animals, and the flowers”; Item 7: “God hears and answers one’s prayers”). Conversely, the nonconformist pole views the concept of God as an antiquated anthropomorphic fiction, psychological projection, or mechanistic superfluity incompatible with scientific rationalism (e.g., Item 6: “The idea of God is useless”; Item 21: “God is only a figment of one’s imagination”; Item 9: “The universe is merely a machine… All notions of Deity as intelligent Being or as a ‘spiritual force’ are fictions”).

2. Immortality and the Afterlife

This sub-construct measures beliefs concerning the persistence of human consciousness beyond biological death, divine retribution, and transcendent salvation. Orthodox attitudes endorse the literal reality of the human soul, post-mortem judgment, and eternal life mediated by divine agency (e.g., Item 31: “The soul lives on after the body dies”; Item 23: “God will, depending on how we behave on earth, reward or punish us in the world to come”). Nonconformist attitudes reject the metaphysical soul as unempirical mythology born of existential dread and wish-fulfillment (e.g., Item 8: “The soul is mere suppositions, having no better standing than a myth”; Item 15: “The notion of retribution in a future life is due to wishful thinking”; Item 40: “There is no life after death”).

3. Religious Doctrine and Divine Revelation

This dimension encompasses an individual’s orientation toward historical supernaturalism, scriptural authority, and the divine origin of theological dogma. Orthodoxy is characterized by faith in historical divine revelation, the veracity of biblical texts, and the literal divinity of Christ (e.g., Item 13: “Christ, as the Gospels state, should be regarded as divine, as the human incarnation of God”; Item 35: “The first writing of the Bible was done under the guidance of God”). Nonconformism reflects an epistemological reliance on empirical science and natural law, discarding supernatural claims as incompatible with modern intellect (e.g., Item 14: “There is no evidence in modern science that the natural universe of human destiny is affected by faith or prayer”; Item 48: “There is a far better way of explaining the working of the world than to assume any God”).

4. The Church as a Social and Spiritual Institution

This domain captures attitudes toward organized ecclesiastical bodies, clergy, and institutional religious practices. The orthodox perspective views the church as an indispensable moral vanguard, a primary vehicle for social uplift, and a benevolent guardian of virtue (e.g., Item 10: “It is by means of the church that peace and good-will may replace hatred and strife throughout the world”; Item 26: “The church is the greatest agency for the uplift of the world”). In sharp contrast, nonconformist attitudes perceive the institutional church as a regressive, hypocritical, and authoritarian structure that obstructs social progress, promotes intolerance, and exploits human gullibility (e.g., Item 3: “The church has acted as an obstruction to the development of social justice”; Item 12: “The church is a harmful institution, breeding narrow-mindedness, fanaticism, and intolerance”; Item 33: “The country would be better off if the churches were closed and the ministers were set to some useful work”).

Theoretical Framework

The construction of the Religious Attitude Inventory is anchored within classical psychological theories of attitude structure, most notably Ego-Involvement Theory, which later formed the cornerstone of Social Judgment Theory formulated by Muzafer Sherif and Carl Hovland (1961). Under this framework, attitudes are not merely cold cognitive evaluations; rather, attitudes situated at the extremes of an ideological continuum become deeply intertwined with an individual’s core self-concept, self-esteem, and social identity.

Ausubel and Schpoont (1957) postulated that when an attitude possesses high ego-involvement, it exhibits distinct behavioral and cognitive characteristics:

• Cognitive Centrality: The attitude is central to the individual’s self-definition. For the religious orthodox individual, identity is inextricably linked to divine purpose, ecclesiastical affiliation, and moral alignment with transcendent law. For the passionate nonconformist, identity is frequently anchored in rationalism, freethought, secular humanism, or anti-clerical intellectualism.
• Narrow Latitudes of Acceptance: Ego-involved individuals maintain highly restricted latitudes of acceptance and broad latitudes of rejection regarding alternative perspectives. Consequently, both orthodox and nonconformist partisans exhibit heightened perceptual distortion when evaluating opposing stances, interpreting ambiguous social stimuli through their primary ideological lens.
• Extremeness and Affective Intensity: As ego-involvement increases, attitude valence shifts toward the extreme poles of the spectrum. Moderate or neutral positions signify low ego-involvement, where religious matters hold little emotional relevance or defining weight for the individual’s psychological equilibrium.

Additionally, the RAI draws conceptually from cognitive consistency theories (e.g., Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory), asserting that individuals actively seek internal harmony across their beliefs regarding the cosmos, morality, institutional loyalty, and personal destiny. The inventory’s structural inclusion of both institutional (church) and cosmological (God, immortality) facets ensures that it assesses this holistic cognitive network rather than an isolated, compartmentalized religious practice.

Validity

The empirical validity of the Religious Attitude Inventory has been substantiated across several decades through content validation, known-groups discrimination, criterion-related validity, and demographic congruence:

Content and Construct Validity

The initial pool of items was developed using a rigorous item-selection methodology. A preliminary form consisting of 156 candidate statements reflecting various degrees of religious sentiment was administered to a judging panel of 38 education graduate students at the University of Illinois. Judges rated each item on a 1 (extremely orthodox) to 5 (extremely nonconformist) scale. Ausubel and Schpoont (1957) computed the mean rating for each statement and retained only the 25 most extreme orthodox statements and the 25 most extreme nonconformist statements. This deliberate extremity selection ensured high construct clarity and content validity, maximizing the inventory’s ability to measure polarized ideological stances.

Known-Groups Discriminant Validity

To evaluate whether the scale could successfully discriminate between individuals with differing degrees of religious orientation, Ausubel and Schpoont (1957) administered the final 50-item scale to 95 undergraduate education students (mean age = 20.5 years). Participants were categorized into three cohorts based on their total scores: an “orthodox” group (top 27.4%, n = 26), a “nonconformist” group (bottom 27.4%, n = 26), and a “neutral” group comprising the remaining middle cohort (n = 43). One-way analysis of variance and subsequent pairwise tests revealed statistically significant differences between all three group means at p < .01. The scale demonstrated robust power in discriminating between individuals across the full spectrum of religious attitude intensity.

Criterion-Related and Concurrent Validity

In an independent psychometric re-examination, Foy, Lowe, Hildman, and Jacobs (1976) evaluated the RAI across two independent samples. In their first sample of 88 undergraduate students from the University of Southern Mississippi, participants completed both the RAI and an independently constructed 5-item index of objective religious background and current religious practices (assessing church attendance frequency, subjective devotional commitment, and prayer habits). The correlation between the RAI aggregate score and this behavioral index was r = .73 (p < .001), indicating strong criterion-related concurrent validity.

Known-Groups Demographic Validity

Foy et al. (1976) administered the inventory anonymously to a broader community sample of 195 Southern Mississippi residents (80 males, 115 females). In alignment with established sociological findings on religiosity (e.g., Lenski, 1953), female respondents scored significantly higher on the RAI than male respondents (p < .001). This confirms the instrument’s sensitivity to documented sociological variations in religious orthodoxy.

Reliability

The Religious Attitude Inventory displays remarkably high internal consistency and split-half equivalence across disparate demographic and regional samples:

• Split-Half Equivalence (Ausubel & Schpoont, 1957): In the initial normative sample of 95 undergraduates, internal consistency was evaluated by calculating total scores for all odd-numbered items and all even-numbered items for each participant. The correlation between the two halves, adjusted using the Spearman–Brown prophecy formula, yielded an equivalence coefficient of r = .97. Ausubel and Schpoont characterized this as an “unusually high internal consistency,” indicating that despite covering four diverse areas (God, immortality, church, doctrine), the items measure a unified psychological construct.
• Independent Replication (Foy et al., 1976): Demonstrating that the high reliability was not an artifact of the initial Illinois sample, Foy and colleagues obtained a Spearman–Brown corrected split-half reliability coefficient of r = .96 in their Southern Mississippi undergraduate sample (N = 88).
• Standard Error of Measurement (SEM): Based on these reliability coefficients, the SEM of the total scale is approximately 4.5 to 5.2 raw score points across a 50–250 range, indicating high precision in individual score estimates.

Although published studies did not evaluate temporal stability (test-retest reliability), the scale’s structural balance—alternating 25 positive and 25 negative items—and its consistent split-half coefficients above .95 suggest high resistance to random measurement error.

Factor Analysis

While Ausubel and Schpoont (1957) initially constructed the inventory under a conceptually multifaceted framework (God, church, doctrine, immortality), empirical factor analytic investigations by Foy, Lowe, Hildman, and Jacobs (1976) evaluated whether the scale operated unidimensionally or multidimensionally.

Principal components exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with orthogonal (Varimax) rotation revealed a dominant general factor accounting for a substantial proportion of the total item variance, supporting the practice of utilizing a single omnibus score. This primary factor reflects General Religious Orthodoxy vs. Secularism, characterized by high positive loadings on items affirming the existence, power, and benevolence of God (e.g., Items 1, 7, 17, 43, 50) and negative loadings on items describing God as a myth, superstition, or fiction (e.g., Items 6, 9, 21, 27, 48).

Secondary sub-factors accounted for residual variance across specific conceptual sub-domains:

• Factor 1: Institutional Anti-Clericalism / Pro-Ecclesiastical Stance: Loaded heavily by items specifically referencing the utility, morality, and social value of the institutional church (e.g., Items 3, 5, 10, 12, 16, 18, 20, 26, 33, 42).
• Factor 2: Metaphysical Supernaturalism & Afterlife: Loaded by items evaluating the existence of the soul, divine immortality, post-mortem judgment, and miraculous intervention (e.g., Items 2, 4, 8, 15, 23, 31, 40, 47).
• Factor 3: Biblical Literalism & Dogma: Loaded by items asserting literal scriptural accuracy and creationist accounts (e.g., Items 19, 28, 35).

Despite these discernible sub-dimensions, the strong intercorrelations among the factors justify treating the RAI primarily as a unidimensional instrument reflecting overall religious traditionalism versus nonconformity.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Religious Attitude Inventory are outlined below:

• Scale Name: Religious Attitude Inventory (RAI)
• Alternative Titles: Ausubel-Schpoont Religious Attitude Scale
• Authors: David P. Ausubel and Seymour H. Schpoont (1957)
• Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computer-administered psychometric questionnaire
• Target Population: Adolescents, university students, and adult general populations
• Item Count: 50 items (25 orthodox statements, 25 nonconformist statements)
• Administration Time: 15 to 20 minutes
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert-type response format:
  • 1 = Strongly agree
  • 2 = Tend to agree more than disagree
  • 3 = Neither agree nor disagree
  • 4 = Tend to disagree more than agree
  • 5 = Strongly disagree
• Scoring Procedure:
  • Items marked with an asterisk (*) are nonconformist/negative statements. In the original scoring rubric described by Ausubel and Schpoont, the numerical weights for these 25 items are reversed prior to summing: a response of 1 is recoded to 5, 2 to 4, 3 remains 3, 4 to 2, and 5 to 1.
  • Alternatively, under modern coding conventions where orthodox agreement yields higher scores directly: orthodox items are scored (Strongly agree = 5, Tend to agree = 4, Neutral = 3, Tend to disagree = 2, Strongly disagree = 1), and nonconformist items are scored (Strongly agree = 1, Tend to agree = 2, Neutral = 3, Tend to disagree = 4, Strongly disagree = 5).
  • Aggregate scores range from 50 to 250.
• Interpretation of Scores:
  • 50 – 116: Extremely Nonconformist / Secular Orientation. Reflects skepticism toward the supernatural, rejection of traditional theological doctrines, and critical or anti-clerical views toward ecclesiastical institutions.
  • 117 – 183: Neutral / Moderate / Agnostic Orientation. Indicates low ego-involvement, ambivalence, nuanced theological positions, or lack of strong conviction toward either orthodoxy or secular nonconformism.
  • 184 – 250: Extremely Orthodox / Traditionalist Orientation. Reflects high ego-involvement, strong adherence to conservative theological doctrines, belief in an active personal God, and deep commitment to the church.
• Bias Minimization Design: The scale incorporates two procedural controls against response bias: (a) orthodox and nonconformist statements alternate across the test form to mitigate acquiescence response set, and (b) an explicit neutral category (“Neither agree nor disagree”) prevents forced polarization.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Religious Attitude Inventory was originally published in 1957 by David P. Ausubel and Seymour H. Schpoont in The Journal of Social Psychology, with the complete instrument and scoring norms subsequently compiled by Marvin E. Shaw and Jack M. Wright in their 1967 reference volume, Scales for the Measurement of Attitudes (McGraw-Hill). Under United States copyright statutes relevant to works published in academic journals during this period, the instrument is widely accessible for non-commercial academic, psychological, and educational research purposes.

Researchers intending to administer the scale in clinical or published empirical studies do not require payment of licensing fees. However, formal professional attribution and citation of the primary sources (Ausubel & Schpoont, 1957; Shaw & Wright, 1967) are expected in accordance with APA ethical guidelines.

References

• Ausubel, D. P., & Schpoont, S. H. (1957). Prediction of group opinion as a function of extremeness of predictor attitudes. The Journal of Social Psychology, 46(1), 19–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1957.9714304
• Dolby, J. R., Hanson, C., & Strayer, R. (1968). Personality factors and religious attitude change. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 7(2), 283. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384638
• Foy, D. W., Lowe, J. D., Hildman, L. K., & Jacobs, K. W. (1976). Reliability, validity, and factor analysis of the Religious Attitude Inventory. Southern Journal of Educational Research, 10(4), 235–241.
• Lenski, G. E. (1953). Social correlates of religious interest. American Sociological Review, 18(5), 533–544. https://doi.org/10.2307/2087494
• Shaw, M. E., & Wright, J. M. (1967). Scales for the Measurement of Attitudes. McGraw-Hill Book Company.
• Sherif, M., & Hovland, C. I. (1961). Social Judgment: Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Communication and Attitude Change. Yale University Press.
• Wyatt, C. S., & Johnson, R. W. (1990). The influence of counselors’ religious values on clients’ perceptions of the counselor. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 18(2), 158–165. https://doi.org/10.1177/009164719001800206

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)