Religious Orientation scale

1. Abstract

The Religious Orientation Scale, specifically operationalized through the psychometric adaptations formalized by John Maltby and Christopher Alan Lewis (1996) as the Age-Universal Intrinsic-Extrinsic Orientation Scale, serves as a seminal instrument within the psychology of religion. Grounded conceptually in the pioneering dual-construct paradigm postulated by Gordon Allport and J. Michael Ross (1967), the instrument systematically assesses the underlying motivations guiding personal faith, spiritual conduct, and religious involvement. The scale delineates between an Intrinsic religious orientation—wherein an individual internalizes religious tenets as a master motive in life—and an Extrinsic religious orientation—wherein religion is utilized instrumentally as a means toward pragmatic, social, or hedonic ends. Adapted from Gorsuch and Venable’s (1983) age-universal version to accommodate diverse cohorts, including religious and non-religious populations, this 19-item self-report questionnaire adopts a triadic response framework: “yes” (scored 3), “not certain” (scored 2), and “no” (scored 1).

Psychometric evaluations across diverse community, student, and cross-cultural cohorts consistently demonstrate robust structural integrity. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirm that the items resolve into the classical two-dimensional model, frequently further bifurcating the extrinsic component into extrinsic-personal (pragmatic comfort, psychological defense) and extrinsic-social (affiliation, community status) sub-factors as identified by Kirkpatrick and Hood (1990). Internal consistency reliability coefficients across published studies typically range between α = .68 and .85 for the Intrinsic subscale, and α = .65 to .82 for the Extrinsic subscale. Construct, convergent, and discriminant validities are firmly established through predictable associations with indexes of mental health, depressive symptomatology, obsessionality, personal prayer frequency, and general well-being. This paper provides an exhaustive review of the instrument’s theoretical origins, factor structure, validation history, psychometric parameters, administrative instructions, and scoring protocols.

2. Keywords

Religious Orientation Scale, Intrinsic Religiosity, Extrinsic Religiosity, Psychology of Religion, Maltby and Lewis, Allport and Ross, Psychometrics, Scale Validation, Factor Analysis, Mental Health and Religion

3. Authors

The revised and widely deployed 19-item version under examination was established by:

• John Maltby, Ph.D. — Professor of Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Leicester, United Kingdom. Dr. Maltby has published extensively in differential psychology, focusing on personality traits, health psychology, psychological well-being, and empirical assessments of religiosity and spirituality.
• Christopher Alan Lewis, D.Phil. — Professor of Psychology, School of Psychology and Institute of Mental Health Sciences, Ulster University, Northern Ireland. Dr. Lewis specializes in religious cognition, psychological measurement, cross-cultural psychometrics, and mental health.

This iteration builds directly on the conceptual framework of Gordon W. Allport and J. Michael Ross (1967) and the reading-level adaptations designed by Richard L. Gorsuch and G. Daniel Venable (1983).

4. Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Religious Orientation Scale is to capture individual differences in the underlying motivational architecture of religiosity, looking beyond mere behavioral frequency, church attendance, or categorical denomination. In empirical social science, nominal religious classification often masks profound disparities in how faith functions psychologically. By dissecting faith into distinct motivational orientations, the instrument clarifies how religious engagement can simultaneously correlate with positive mental health outcomes, psychological resilience, prejudice, or psychological distress.

Research Applications

Within empirical personality and social psychology, the instrument enables investigators to dissect the complex correlations between religiosity and personality frameworks, including the Five-Factor Model and Eysenckian personality dimensions. Research led by Maltby, Lewis, and colleagues has illuminated how intrinsic religiosity frequently associates with personal autonomy, life satisfaction, and subjective well-being, whereas extrinsic religiosity correlates with trait anxiety, external locus of control, dogmatism, and depressive symptoms. Cross-cultural and epidemiological surveys deploy the scale to assess how existential coping strategies moderate stressful life events, physical illness, and bereavement.

Clinical and Applied Settings

In clinical, pastoral, and counseling contexts, the scale functions as an assessment protocol to evaluate whether a client’s spiritual engagement serves as a psychological asset or a liability. An individual displaying high intrinsic orientation often mobilizes faith as an integrative framework that promotes emotional regulation, moral consistency, and existential purpose. Conversely, an individual characterized primarily by high extrinsic orientation may experience elevated existential conflict, cognitive dissonance, guilt, or religious strain, using external rituals superficially to quell anxiety or maintain social standing. Such insights assist clinicians in customizing therapeutic interventions, specifically within cognitive-behavioral or acceptance-based frameworks addressing spiritual struggle and moral injury.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the Religious Orientation Scale is operationalized through two core dimensions: Intrinsic Religious Orientation and Extrinsic Religious Orientation.

Intrinsic Religious Orientation

Intrinsic religiosity conceptualizes faith as an end in itself. Individuals with an intrinsic orientation internalize the doctrines and moral teachings of their religious traditions, synthesizing them into a core identity and life framework. Gordon Allport famously described intrinsic believers as those who “live their religion.” In this framework:

• Core Motivation: Devotion is autonomous, sincere, and holistic. Religious considerations actively guide everyday decisions, interpersonal relationships, and value judgments.
• Private Practice: Great emphasis is placed on solitary contemplation, personal prayer, and self-examination away from social observation (e.g., Item 5: “It is important to me to spend time in private thought and prayer”).
• Meaning Making: Faith serves as a foundational cognitive schema that answers existential inquiries regarding purpose, suffering, and mortality (e.g., Item 10: “My religion is important to me because it answers many questions about the meaning of life”).
• Internal Integration: Values derived from religious teaching are not compromised for social convenience or peer approval (e.g., Item 15: “My whole approach to life is based on my religion”).

Extrinsic Religious Orientation

Extrinsic religiosity treats faith instrumentally—as a functional means to achieve non-religious, utilitarian objectives. Allport characterized extrinsic believers as those who “use their religion.” In psychometric literature, this dimension frequently bifurcates into two distinct sub-components:

• Extrinsic-Social (Es): Religion is utilized to achieve social cohesion, community acceptance, networking, and public belonging. The house of worship serves as a social club or an avenue for interpersonal prestige (e.g., Item 2: “I go to my place of worship because it helps me to make friends”; Item 14: “I go to my place of worship mostly to spend time with my friends”).
• Extrinsic-Personal (Ep): Religion functions as an emotional buffer or defensive coping mechanism designed to relieve acute distress, secure protection, and obtain comfort during crises without demanding comprehensive moral or lifestyle commitment (e.g., Item 7: “I pray mainly to gain relief and protection”; Item 9: “What religion offers me most is comfort in times of trouble and sorrow”).

Consequently, extrinsic orientation reflects externalized compliance, utilitarian bargaining, and situational expediency, often lacking internal integration into the self-concept.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual heritage of the Religious Orientation Scale traces directly to Gordon W. Allport’s post-World War II investigations into the root causes of racial, ethnic, and social prejudice. In landmark empirical investigations, Allport noted a sociological paradox: active churchgoers frequently exhibited higher levels of racial prejudice, intolerance, and ethnocentrism than non-churchgoers. To resolve this empirical anomaly, Allport theorized that “churchgoers” do not constitute a psychologically homogeneous population. Instead, he proposed that religion serves radically different psychological functions across individuals.

Allport and Ross (1967) formally bifurcated religious motivation into Intrinsic and Extrinsic poles:

“The extrinsically motivated person uses his religion, whereas the intrinsically motivated lives his. Extrinsic values are always instrumental and utilitarian. Persons with this orientation may find religion useful in a variety of ways—to provide security and solace, sociability and distraction, status and self-justification… The intrinsic orientation, on the other hand, is comprehensive and integrative. Having embraced a religious creed, the individual endeavors to internalize it and follow it fully.”

Allport and Ross initially classified respondents into four distinct typologies based on median splits across both scales:

1. Consistently Intrinsic: High Intrinsic, Low Extrinsic.
2. Consistently Extrinsic: Low Intrinsic, High Extrinsic.
3. Indiscriminately Pro-religious: High Intrinsic, High Extrinsic (characterized by an uncritical endorsement of any religious item).
4. Indiscriminately Non-religious / Anti-religious: Low Intrinsic, Low Extrinsic.

Subsequent psychometric scrutiny by Kirkpatrick and Hood (1990) criticized the operationalization of extrinsic religiosity as an unintegrated grab-bag of secondary motives, advocating that intrinsic and extrinsic orientations should be treated as continuous, distinct orthogonal dimensions rather than opposite ends of a single continuum. Further, Richard L. Gorsuch and G. Daniel Venable (1983) observed that Allport’s original phrasing required high reading comprehension and was unsuited for children, adolescents, or non-college adults. They created the “Age-Universal” revision by simplifying sentence syntax and eliminating complex theological vocabulary.

In 1996, John Maltby and Christopher Alan Lewis further adjusted the Age-Universal scale. They noted that secularization across Europe and parts of North America resulted in measurement bias when questionnaires assumed that all respondents attended church or actively held formal theological beliefs. By recalibrating specific items and establishing normative structures across both religious and non-religious cohorts, Maltby and Lewis preserved the intrinsic/extrinsic dualism while maximizing applicability to general non-clinical, non-denominational populations.

7. Validity

The construct, convergent, and discriminant validities of the Religious Orientation Scale have been documented across decades of empirical psychometric literature.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by the consistent emergence of intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions across confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) models. Studies testing Maltby and Lewis’s (1996) adaptation demonstrate satisfactory goodness-of-fit indices (χ²/df < 2.5, RMSEA ≤ .06, CFI ≥ .92) when modeling intrinsic religiosity alongside bifurcated extrinsic-personal and extrinsic-social latent traits. This factor invariance holds across gender cohorts and across varied Christian and non-Christian religious traditions.

Convergent Validity

The convergent validity of the Intrinsic subscale is supported by strong positive correlations with related constructs:

• Frequency of Personal Prayer: Maltby, Lewis, and Day (1999) demonstrated robust associations between intrinsic orientation and the frequency of solitary personal prayer (r values typically ranging from .45 to .65, p < .001).
• Religious Coping: Positive correlations are consistently found with Pargament’s Positive Religious Coping subscale (RCOPE).
• Quest Orientation: Discriminated meaningfully from Batson’s Quest Religious Orientation, capturing mature commitment rather than existential doubt or ongoing searching (Maltby & Day, 1998).

Discriminant and Criterion Validity

The scale effectively discriminates between functional and dysfunctional modalities of psychological adjustment:

• Depressive Symptomatology: Maltby and Day (2000) demonstrated that while extrinsic religiosity correlates positively with depressive symptoms as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), intrinsic religiosity shows either non-significant or weak inverse correlations, often attenuating depressive vulnerability when controlling for neuroticism.
• Obsessionality and Neuroticism: Maltby, McCollam, and Millar (1994) identified that extrinsic religiosity accounts for shared variance with obsessional traits and trait anxiety, whereas intrinsic religiosity remains uncorrelated with obsessional neurosis.
• Subjective Happiness: Lewis, Maltby, and Day (2005) examined UK community samples and verified that religious coping strategies and intrinsic orientation predict life satisfaction, whereas extrinsic orientation shows no positive association with perceived happiness (Lewis, Maltby, & Burkinshaw, 2000).

8. Reliability

Psychometric evaluations across international samples verify that the 19-item Age-Universal Intrinsic-Extrinsic Orientation Scale yields acceptable to high internal consistency and temporal stability.

Internal Consistency

• Intrinsic Orientation Subscale: Across varied samples (Maltby & Lewis, 1996; Lewis et al., 2005), Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the intrinsic dimension consistently fall between α = .78 and .86 in practicing religious samples, and between α = .68 and .76 in secularized student cohorts. The slightly lower alpha in secular groups reflects restricted variance in solitary religious behaviors.
• Extrinsic Orientation Subscale: When computed as a composite 11-item construct, Cronbach’s alpha typically ranges from α = .70 to .82. When separated into its primary components according to Kirkpatrick and Hood’s framework, the Extrinsic-Personal subscale displays coefficients between α = .68 and .78, while the Extrinsic-Social subscale exhibits values between α = .65 and .79.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability assessments administered over test-retest intervals ranging from 4 weeks to 6 months reveal substantial coefficients. Longitudinal assessments reported in differential psychology studies indicate test-retest reliability indices of r = .81 to .88 for Intrinsic Orientation and r = .74 to .82 for Extrinsic Orientation, confirming that these subscales measure enduring motivational dispositions rather than transient emotional states.

9. Factor Analysis

Factor-analytic investigations of the 19-item scale have historically focused on whether extrinsic items constitute a unified construct or multiple dimensions.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial principal components and exploratory factor analyses utilizing Varimax or Promax (oblique) rotations repeatedly extract two to three primary factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0:

• Factor 1 (Intrinsic): Accounts for the largest percentage of explained variance (typically between 22% and 32%). Items 1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 15, and 18 load cleanly on this factor, with primary factor loadings exceeding .50 and negligible cross-loadings (< .25) on extrinsic factors. Note that Item 8 is consistently identified in structural literature as an Intrinsic item.
• Factor 2 (Extrinsic-Social): Captures items concerning social affiliation and attendance (Items 2, 14, 16), with factor loadings generally spanning .55 to .75.
• Factor 3 (Extrinsic-Personal): Captures utilitarian motives, solace, and comfort seeking (Items 7, 9, 12), with loadings spanning .45 to .70. Items reflecting marginal commitment (Items 3, 4, 13, 19) load predominantly on extrinsic dimensions, occasionally forming an extrinsic-avoidance facet.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analytic investigations directly compare competing structural paradigms:

1. Unidimensional Model: All items loading on a single latent “Religiosity” construct. This model consistently demonstrates poor fit (χ²/df > 6.0, RMSEA > .12, CFI < .70).
2. Two-Factor Orthogonal/Oblique Model: All Intrinsic items loading on Factor 1 and all Extrinsic items loading on Factor 2. This represents an acceptable fit (χ²/df ≈ 2.8, RMSEA ≈ .07, CFI ≈ .88).
3. Three-Factor Model (Intrinsic, Extrinsic-Personal, Extrinsic-Social): This structural configuration yields the best empirical fit across modern studies: Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≈ .051; Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≈ .94; Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≈ .93; and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≈ .048.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Age-Universal Intrinsic-Extrinsic Orientation Scale (Revised / Maltby & Lewis Adaptation)
• Original Conceptualization: Gordon W. Allport & J. Michael Ross (1967); adapted by Richard L. Gorsuch & G. Daniel Venable (1983); refined by John Maltby & Christopher Alan Lewis (1996)
• Administration Format: Self-report paper-and-pencil questionnaire or digital online survey
• Target Population: Adolescents, university students, adult community populations; applicable across practicing religious and secular/non-religious cohorts
• Total Number of Items: 19 statements
• Response Scale: 3-point categorical format:
  • yes = 3
  • not certain = 2
  • no = 1
• Subscales and Item Breakdown:
  • Intrinsic Subscale (8 items): Items 1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 15, 18. (Note: Item 6 occasionally co-loads on intrinsic experiences depending on denominational context, but is keyed as Extrinsic in the source layout; Item 8 is standardly intrinsic).
  • Extrinsic Subscale (11 items): Items 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19.
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Sum or average the respective item values to generate continuous scores for Intrinsic Orientation and Extrinsic Orientation.
  • Higher subscale scores reflect a greater degree of that motivational orientation.
  • If applying Kirkpatrick and Hood’s three-component framework: Extrinsic-Social is computed via Items 2, 14, 16; Extrinsic-Personal is computed via Items 7, 9, 12.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Age-Universal Intrinsic-Extrinsic Orientation Scale was published in its refined empirical form by John Maltby and Christopher Alan Lewis in 1996 in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. The scale is in the public domain for non-commercial academic, clinical, and scientific research. Researchers may administer, reproduce, and translate the scale without paying licensing fees or obtaining formal written permission, provided that full bibliographic attribution is accorded to the original authors and validation papers. Commercial utilization, automated computerized scoring systems marketed for profit, or inclusion within proprietary assessment packages require consultation and licensing agreement with the copyright holders and publishers.

12. References

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

Gorsuch, R. L., & Venable, G. D. (1983). Development of an “Age-Universal” I-E scale. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 22(2), 181–187. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385677

Kirkpatrick, L. A., & Hood, R. W. (1990). Intrinsic-extrinsic religious orientation: The boon or bane of contemporary psychology of religion? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 29(4), 442–462. https://doi.org/10.2307/1387311

Lewis, C. A., Maltby, J., & Burkinshaw, S. (2000). Religion and happiness: Still no association. Journal of Beliefs and Values, 21(2), 233–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/713676182

Lewis, C. A., Maltby, J., & Day, L. (2005). Religious orientation, religious coping and happiness among UK adults. Personality and Individual Differences, 38(5), 1193–1202. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2004.08.002

Maltby, J., & Day, L. (1998). Amending a measure of the Quest Religious Orientation: Applicability of the scale’s use among religious and non-religious persons. Personality and Individual Differences, 25(3), 517–522. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(98)00078-4

Maltby, J., & Day, L. (2000). Depressive symptoms and religious orientation: Examining the relationship between religiosity and depression within the context of other correlates of depression. Personality and Individual Differences, 28(2), 383–393. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(99)00108-5

Maltby, J., & Lewis, C. A. (1996). Measuring intrinsic and extrinsic orientation toward religion: Amendments for its use among religious and non-religious samples. Personality and Individual Differences, 21(6), 937–946. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(96)00147-8

Maltby, J., Lewis, C. A., & Day, L. (1999). Religious orientation and psychological well-being: The role of the frequency of personal prayer. British Journal of Health Psychology, 4(4), 363–378. https://doi.org/10.1348/135910799168696

Maltby, J., McCollam, P., & Millar, D. (1994). Religiosity and obsessionality: A refinement. The Journal of Psychology, 128(6), 609–611. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1994.9921295

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)