The sorokin multidimensional inventory of love experience (SMILE): development, validation, and religious determinants

This paper describes the development and validation of the Sorokin Multidimensional Inventory of Love Experience (SMILE), a 24-item scale based on the writing of soci-ologist Pitirim Sorokin. The SMILE contains six subscales of four items each, corre-sponding to what Sorokin termed the religious, ethical, ontological, biological, psychological, and social domains of love. Through confirmatory factor analysis, all factor loadings were found to be strong and statistically significant. A model speci-fying intercorrelations among all subscales exhibited good overall fit, although bio-logical love was only weakly related to the other factors. Finally, through hierarchical OLS regression, religious measures were found to be significant determinants of scores on five of six subscales. This confirms Sorokin’s hypothesis that affirming the expe-rience of love is in part a function of religiousness. The SMILE promises to broaden the scope of social research on love and to promote investigation of this neglected psychosocial construct. Throughout history, the writings of great poets, philosophers, saints, and mystics fromacross cultures and religions have proclaimed love—given and received—to be theessence of a life well lived. The experience of loving and being loved in return, more-over, may have certain consequences—an instrumentality, in the language of sociology. For 13th century Sufi master Jalaluddin Rumi, “Through love all that is bitter will be sweet