Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2015

Publication Title

Secularism and Nonreligion

DOI

https://doi.org/10.17582/journal.src/2015/2.3.36.53

ISSN

2053-6712

Abstract

Although hundreds of measures of personal religiousness and spirituality exist, none are capable of reliably and validly assessing individuals who identify as nonreligious and nonspiritual. There is a need to develop a valid and reliable measure of (non)religiousness and (non)spirituality. This article discusses these problems, and presents the development and initial validation of a 17-item Nonreligious-Nonspiritual Scale (NRNSS) across three studies. The NRNSS exhibited high internal consistency (α > .94) and high test-retest reliability (r = .92). Two exploratory and one confirmatory factor analysis of the NRNSS supported the hypothesized two-factor solution: (a) institutional religiousness and (b) individualistic spirituality. The NRNSS also demonstrated convergent validity through theoretically-expected correlations with established measures of religiousness and spirituality (the Cross-Cultural Dimensions of Religiosity, Humanistic Morality, and Traditional Religious Morality scales). In summary, the NRNSS may work as an initial attempt to address the limitations of other scales for capturing how religious/nonreligious/nonspiritual individuals are.

Comments

Open Access authors retain the copyrights of their papers, and all open access articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.

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