Assessment, Statistics, and Research: Spiritual Abuse Questionnaire (SAQ) by Kathryn Hope Keller

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Spiritual Abuse Questionnaire (SAQ) by Kathryn Hope Keller

Scale name: Spiritual Abuse Questionnaire (SAQ)

Scale overview: The Spiritual Abuse Questionnaire (SAQ) is a 17-item self-report questionnaire that uses a 4-point Likert Type response format to measure two dimensions of abuse: Power-based affective wounding and Conditionality.

Author: Kathryn Hope Keller

Response Type: 4-point Likert type. The choices are: Strongly disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly agree.

Subscales and Sample Items: There are two subscales.

1. Power-based Affective Wounding: “At times, I was

scolded by my leader and made to feel ashamed and helpless” and “I now feel cynical

about church/religious groups.”

2. Conditionality: “I believed I could be totally surrendered to God if I did everything

perfectly according to the church/group’s instructions,” and “I believed God would

punish me if I didn’t do what my church/group encouraged me to do.”

Reliability: Alpha for the 17-item scale was .95 (Keller, 2016). The study sample was 271 and the mean was 50.62 (SD = 14.87, SEM = .90) and Min-Max were 21-80.

Validity: Confirmatory factor analysis yielded a two-factor solution.

Quoted text below-

For the RSS, r =.76, p<.01. For the subscales, results are as follows: Divine Struggles, r=.68, p<.01; Demonic Struggles, r=.31, p<.01; Interpersonal Struggles, r=.81, p<.01; Moral Struggles, r=.52, p<.01; Doubt Struggle, r=.66, p<.01; and Ultimate Meaning Struggles, r=.54, p<.01. These findings suggest that participants with higher levels of spiritual abuse also experience higher levels of religious and spiritual struggles. (Keller, 2016, page 138)