Assessment, Statistics, and Research

Assessment name:  Adolescent Religious Coping Scale Scale overview: The Adolescent Religious Coping Scale is a multidimensional measure of adolescent religious coping developed to assess the relationship between religious coping and emotional functioning.  Authors : Jeffrey P. Bjorck and others – see 2010 reference below Response Type : Self-report ratings Scale items: There are seven subscales as follows organized in two groupings: I. ACTIVE COPING 1 Positive God focused Coping 2 Seeking Religious Support 3 Constructive Distraction II. PASSIVE COPING 4 Questioning 5 Avoidance 6 Denial 7 Deferring Psychometric properties The main sample data were gathered from 2 Christian schools in Southern California. (N = 500) The second sample was from a Church of Christ Congregation in Texas (N = 62). The results of factor analysis supported 7 factors and 39 total items. Cronbach alpha values are provided in the article. There is support for content, construct, and concurrent validity in...

  Geoffrey Sutton 2023 created in Canva Assessment name:   Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale--14 Item Version (RSS-14) Scale overview: The Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale--14 Item Version (RSS-14) was developed to assess personal experiences with religious or spiritual struggles in six domains when a brief questionnaire is more suitable than the longer 26-item version. Follow this link to the 26-item version. Authors: Julia Exline et al. (2022) Response Type: A rating scale of frequency of experience: : 1 (not at all/does not apply), 2 (a little bit), 3 (somewhat), 4 (quite a bit), and 5 (a great deal). Scale items Like the longer version, this shorter 14-item version assigns scale items to 6 categories of struggle : Divine (Div); Demonic (Dem); Interpersonal (Int); Moral (Mor); Doubt (Dbt); Ultimate meaning (Ult). Samples Divine - felt as though God had abandoned me Doubt- felt troubled by doubts or questions about religion or spirituality ...

  Assessment name:   Christian Spiritual Surrender Scale (CSSS) Scale overview: The Christian Spiritual Surrender Scale (CSSS) is a 10-item self-report measure of spiritual surrender as a method of coping with adversity. Authors: Laura Shannonhouse and others Response Type: A rating scale using a five-point scale of agreement where 0 = strongly disagree to 4 = strongly agree Sample Scale items I actively chose to turn my suffering over to God because I knew God loved me. 2. I turned my troubles over to God while I actively tried to live out God’s plan.   Psychometric properties Cronbach’s alpha value was strong at .93. Content validity was supported by expert judgment. Construct validity was supported by factor analysis indicating one factor. The authors also reported correlations with other measures supporting convergent and divergent validity.   Availability: Author contact listed: lshannonhouse@gsu.edu The full set of 10 items is...

  Assessment name:   Divine Spiritual Struggles Scale Scale overview: The Divine Spiritual Struggles Scale measures the degree of distress experienced by adolescents in their relationship with God or a higher power. Scale data were obtained from a sample of adolescents who reported sexual abuse.   Authors: Ernest Jouriles and others (see scale reference)     Response Type: Four items are rated on a 4-point scale of frequency related to feeling “punished, abandoned, and questioned God’s love” when they thought about sexual abuse in the preceding month. 0 = not at all 1 = somewhat 2 = quite a bit 3 = a great deal Scale items The four items in the scale can be found in the PsycTESTS reference below. Psychometric properties The scale was used in two studies (see Jouriles et al., 2020) with a combined n of 347 adolescents who had a mean age of 13.53 and 13.71, respectively. More than 90% were girls. Most of the girls identified as Chri...

  Scale name:   Inventory of Complicated Spiritual Grief 2.0 Scale overview The ICSG 2.0 is a 28-item scale. Participants are asked to think about their loss and respond to items to express their beliefs about their feelings. The second version was published as ICSG 2.0 in 2019. Authors: Laurie A. Burke and others (2014) - see reference below For Version 2.0 See Burke et al., 2019 and Burke et al., 2021 Response Type All items are rated on a 5-point Likert-type rating. Subscales : The authors list items associated with three subscales: 1. Insecurity with God 2. Disruption in Religious Practice 3. Estrangement from Spiritual Community Sample items   I’m confused as to why God would let this happen.  People in my spiritual community don’t want me to express my grief much or at all.   Reliability and Validity See the publications for details. Internal consistency is strong. Experts and focus group participants provided evidence of c...

  Mental health professionals have recognized the importance of religion and spirituality to wellbeing. I have seen intake forms that ignore spirituality or ask only about a person’s religious identity or if they would like a visit from a chaplain or clergy during a hospitalization. Clinicians can reasonably ask how to explore the importance of spirituality to treatment without being overly intrusive or disrespectful when a patient does not volunteer relevant information. David Hodge (2013) offers four screening questions based on his review of the literature (p. 98). I offer a paraphrase of Hodge’s suggestions and suggest consulting his chapter, which I found in my university library (see reference below). Each question is tied to a one-word therapeutic purpose. 1. Importance How important is spiritual or religious faith to you? 2. Affiliation Do you attend religious services? Do you participate in any groups that would be considered religious or spiritual? 3. Resour...

The Brief RCOPE scale is a 14-item measure of religious coping developed and studied by Kenneth Pargament (e.g., 1997) and his colleagues. The scale is based on coping theory applied to religion and aims to help researchers understand one relationship between people and their religion when they experience a stressful life experience. Research supports two dimensions of coping reflected in the RCOPE scale: positive and negative. These two dimensions are the basis for two subscales of the Brief RCOPE labelled accordingly as Positive Religious Coping Subscale (PRC ) and Negative Religious Subscale (NRC ). Positive coping means drawing upon spiritual resources in a way that helps people cope with stressful events. Such people may have a secure relationship with God or a higher power, hold a benevolent worldview, and have positive relationships with religious others. Negative religious coping indicates intrapersonal religious or spiritual struggles . The conflict may be exp...