Measuring Religiousness and Spirituality: Issues, Existing Measures, and the Implications for Education and Wellbeing

Abstract This chapter consists of three major parts. The first part discusses general issues related to measurement in the psychology of religion. The second part reviews major measures of religiousness and spirituality by general religious and spiritual domain, concentrating on those areas and measures that have been (or might be) associated with educational processes and outcomes as well as general wellbeing. Only those measures judged to meet adequately acceptable standards for research purposes on the following criteria are discussed: theoretical basis, representative sampling and generalization, reliability, and validity. The final section talks about new developments in the measurement of religion and spirituality and alternatives to self-report or paper-and-pencil measures and offers guidance in choosing a measure for research in education and wellbeing. In 1770, Pieter Camper, a Dutch scholar and one of the first proponents of craniometry, invented the concept of the "facial angle" as a way to measure intelligence among various races. A "facial angle" was formed by drawing two lines-one horizontally from the nostril to the ear and another perpendicularly from the upper jawbone to the forehead. Camper maintained that the closer the angle of the lines was to 90 • , the more intelligent a person was. He claimed that Europeans consistently had angles of 80 • , Africans of 70 • , and orangutans of 58 • . Samuel George Morton extended Camper's work by using cranial capacity (the volume of the interior of the skull) as a measure of intelligence. He, too, concluded that European Americans were the most intelligent, followed by African-Americans and Native Americans. These "scientific" findings were used to perpetuate racial stereotypes and justify racist practices for decades. Clearly, measurement matters. As the means by which one tests a hypothesis or an idea, measurement is often the bridge between theory and practice; it not only allows us to test our conceptual framework and assumptions, but often does so in various practical and applied settings. How a particular concept is defined and measured significantly impacts understandings of the world, and influences no