Christian Spiritual Surrender Scale (CSSS)

Abstract

The Christian Spiritual Surrender Scale (CSSS; Shannonhouse et al., 2023) is a self-reported instrument developed to measure the unique and distinct religious coping practice of spiritual surrender to God within a Christian context. The scale’s construction was rooted in theological and psychological literature, beginning with an initial pool of 52 items designed to capture spiritual surrender as an active, conscious choice made when facing adversity, grounded in trust in a loving God.

Following comprehensive expert review and cognitive interviewing, the item pool was refined to 17 items. These items underwent rigorous psychometric evaluation across multiple samples of adult Christian participants in the United States who had experienced suffering. The final, validated measure consists of 10 items, demonstrating strong factor structure, reliability, and validity, establishing the CSSS as a valuable tool for assessing this specific coping mechanism.

Keywords

Adversity, Christian Spiritual Surrender, Religious Coping, Suffering, Spiritual Surrender, Psychometric Evaluation, Construct Validity, Internal Consistency, Negative Life Events, Coping Style.

Authors

Laura Shannonhouse, Jason McMartin, Shane J. Sacco, M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, Crystal L. Park, Dahee Kim, Eric Silverman, Kelly Kapic, Jamie Aten.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the CSSS is to assess the self-reported frequency and use of spiritual surrender as an active coping strategy. This instrument specifically targets the emic, or insider, conceptualization of surrender unique to Christian theology, focusing on individuals’ responses when encountering negative life events or significant personal challenges.

Construct

The core construct measured is Christian spiritual surrender, defined as an intentional, trust-based act of placing one’s troubles in the hands of God while simultaneously continuing to engage actively in life and manage aspects within one’s control. Crucially, this construct differentiates itself from passive resignation or religious deferral by emphasizing a dynamic relationship with God and proactive behavior in the face of suffering.

The scale items are designed to capture the complexity inherent in this process, including the conscious choice to surrender, the underlying trust in God’s love and plan, and the persistence of personal efforts alongside divine reliance.

Validity

The validation process confirmed the robustness of the CSSS across several domains:

• Face and Content Validity: These were established early in development through extensive feedback provided by religious experts and participants from diverse Christian traditions, ensuring the items accurately reflected the intended construct.

• Construct Validity: Supported by the strong findings from the Factor Analysis and the expected pattern of correlations with other constructs, both conceptually related and unrelated.

• Convergent Validity: The CSSS demonstrated a positive relationship with intrinsic religiosity, confirming its link to deeply held religious motivation. Conversely, it showed a negative correlation with anxious and avoidant insecure attachment styles toward God.

• Discriminant Validity: The scale exhibited small correlation coefficients with the Passive Religious Deferral Scale (RCOPE; Pargament et al., 2000), confirming that the active nature of Christian spiritual surrender is statistically distinct from passive coping strategies.

• Incremental Validity: The CSSS showed capacity to predict variance in positive outcomes, such as satisfaction with life and positive feelings, even after accounting for existing measures, thereby establishing its unique contribution to the psychological assessment of religious coping.

Reliability

The CSSS demonstrates excellent reliability, indicating high internal consistency among the 10 items. The measure yielded a strong Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .93, suggesting that the items reliably measure the proposed construct of Christian spiritual surrender.

Factor Analysis

Both exploratory and confirmatory methods were used to establish the factor structure of the CSSS.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA): The initial EFA on 17 items supported a single factor, accounting for 53.82% of the variance. After theoretical refinement and removal of seven problematic items, a second EFA on the final 10 items confirmed a clear one-factor solution, which accounted for 56.69% of the overall variance extracted. All items retained high factor loadings (greater than 0.50).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA): The CFA provided strong evidence for the fit of the one-factor model to the data: 𝜒²(35) = 51.56, p < .05, CFI = .995, RMSEA = .04 [0.01, 0.06], and SRMR = .02. Item loadings within the CFA ranged from 0.79 to 0.88, further supporting the strong unidimensionality of the scale.

Instrument

Test Type: Original

Format: Items on the CSSS are rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). The administration method utilized in the validation study was electronic (online survey).

Language Available: English

Population Group: Human (Male and Female)

Age Group: Adulthood (18 years and older), covering Young Adulthood (18-29 years), Thirties (30-39 years), Middle Age (40-64 years), and Aged (65 years and older).

Population Details: The initial validation study participants were Christian individuals residing in the United States who had reported experiencing suffering.

Test Methodology: Test Validity, Construct Validity, Content Validity, Convergent Validity, Discriminant Validity, Test Reliability, Internal Consistency, Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Exploratory Factor Analysis.

Keywords

Adversity, Religious Practices, Christianity, Religious Beliefs, Life Experiences, Stress and Coping Measures, Spiritual Surrender, Psychological Assessment.

Authors

Primary Author: Laura Shannonhouse

Author ORCID Identifier (L. Shannonhouse): http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6822-8763

Affiliation Email addresses: [email protected] (Primary contact). Email addresses for co-authors are not universally provided in the source data.

Correspondence Address: Georgia State University, Department of Counseling and Psychological Services, 30 Pryor Street, Suite 950, Atlanta, Georgia, United States, 30303.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Permissions: The instrument may be used freely for non-commercial Research and Teaching purposes.

Commercial Use: No

Fee: No fee is required for the use of the CSSS.

Test Year: 2023

Reference’s

Shannonhouse, L., McMartin, J., Sacco, S. J., Hall, M. E. L., Park, C. L., Kim, D., Silverman, E., Kapic, K., & Aten, J. (2024). Spiritual surrender: Measurement of an emic Christian religious coping strategy. Spirituality in Clinical Practice, 11(2), 173–185. https://doi.org/10.1037/scp0000314

Items of the Christian Spiritual Surrender Scale (CSSS)

The final 10 items of the CSSS are as follows:

1. 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.

3. Knowing that God is with me and for me helped me turn my troubles over to God.

4. I actively chose to put my troubles in the hands of God while I continued to work on what I had control over.

5. When I had no control, I surrendered my suffering to God, because I trusted in God.

6. I turned my troubles over to God in trust when I was hurting.

7. Even though my circumstances weren’t what I wanted them to be, I continued to trust God and God’s plan for my life.

8. When I was in trouble, I entrusted myself to God’s care while I continued to do all I could.

9. I wanted what God wanted for me more than what I wanted for myself, which helped me put my troubles in God’s hands.

10. When circumstances were hard, I asked God to help me accept God’s plan for my life.

Note: Items on the CSSS are rated from 0 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree).