Multidimensional Inventory of Religious/Spiritual Well-Being (MI-RSWB)

Abstract

The Multidimensional Inventory for Religious/Spiritual Well-Being (MI-RSWB) is a comprehensive, 48-item psychometric instrument developed primarily by H. F. Unterrainer to assess various facets of religious and spiritual well-being. Unlike single-dimension scales, the MI-RSWB utilizes a six-factor structure to capture the complexity of this construct, including both traditional religious orientation and broader existential experiences. The scale is designed to be utilized in clinical, academic, and cross-cultural research settings to explore the relationship between spiritual health and psychological outcomes, such as personality dimensions, coping styles, and mental illness.

Keywords

Religious/Spiritual Well-Being, MI-RSWB, Psychometric, Religiosity, Forgiveness, Hope Transcendent, Connectedness, Sense and Meaning.

Authors

Human-Friedrich Unterrainer, K. H. Ladenhauf, M. L. Moazedi, S. J. Wallner-Liebmann, A. Fink, O. Nelson, J. Collicutt.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the MI-RSWB is to provide a detailed, multidimensional assessment of an individual’s religious/spiritual well-being. This scale was constructed to overcome the limitations of earlier instruments that often focused narrowly on either religious commitment or existential well-being. By measuring six distinct dimensions, the MI-RSWB allows researchers and clinicians to differentiate between various facets of spiritual experience, enabling a finer-grained analysis of how specific spiritual components relate to mental health, coping mechanisms, and overall quality of life.

The scale is instrumental in investigating the protective or risk factors associated with religious and spiritual engagement, particularly in clinical populations, such as individuals with substance use disorders, and in cross-cultural comparative studies.

Construct

The MI-RSWB measures the broad construct of Religious/Spiritual Well-Being through six empirically derived subscales, ensuring a holistic understanding of the individual’s inner life. These dimensions cover both traditional, institutional aspects of faith and non-denominational, mystical, or existential components.

• General Religiosity (GR): Focuses on conventional religious faith, security derived from belief, and engagement with religious community events.
• Forgiveness (FO): Measures the capacity to forgive others and oneself, often involving the absence of vengeful thoughts and hatred. Note that most items in this subscale are inverse coded, reflecting unforgiving attitudes.
• Hope Immanent (HI): Reflects optimism and positive expectations regarding the future in the present, terrestrial life.
• Connectedness (CO): Assesses feelings of being absorbed into something greater, experiencing supernatural connections, and having profound, inexpressible experiences.
• Hope Transcendent (HT): Measures beliefs related to afterlife, continuation of existence after death, and anxieties related to mortality or accountability after death. This dimension largely consists of inverse-coded items related to death anxiety.
• Experiences of Sense and Meaning (SM): Captures the attainment of deep affection, true feelings, honesty, and a clear understanding of the meaning of life.

Validity

The validity of the MI-RSWB has been supported across multiple studies and cultural contexts. Initial validation work established strong relationships between the MI-RSWB factors and established personality dimensions (e.g., the Big Five model) and measures of psychological well-being, confirming its theoretical relevance within existing psychological frameworks. Specifically, higher scores on positive dimensions of the MI-RSWB have been consistently linked to better adjustment and lower levels of distress.

Cross-cultural studies, including the validation of the Farsi version, have demonstrated the structural consistency and applicability of the six-factor model outside of the original German and English-speaking samples. Furthermore, research has shown that the MI-RSWB dimensions correlate meaningfully with specific clinical variables, such as coping styles and symptom severity in populations dealing with substance use disorders, thereby establishing its clinical utility and criterion validity.

Reliability

The MI-RSWB demonstrates high internal consistency, both for the total scale and its individual subscales, suggesting that the items within each dimension reliably measure the intended construct. The overall Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient for the 48-item scale is reported to be 0.91, indicating excellent reliability.

The internal consistency for the six subscales, as reported in the validation studies, is robust:

• General Religiosity (GR): 0.96
• Forgiveness (FO): 0.84
• Hope Immanent (HI): 0.82
• Connectedness (CO): 0.82
• Hope Transcendent (HT): 0.75
• Experiences of Sense and Meaning (SM): 0.77

These high coefficients assure that the scale provides stable and consistent measurements of religious/spiritual well-being across its diverse components.

Factor Analysis

The MI-RSWB was developed based on factor analytic procedures designed to isolate distinct, yet related, dimensions of spiritual experience. The resulting structure confirmed a six-factor solution, which accounts for the multidimensional nature of the construct. These factors are statistically independent enough to provide unique information but collectively contribute to a comprehensive understanding of religious/spiritual well-being.

The six factors identified are General Religiosity (GR), Forgiveness (FO), Hope Immanent (HI), Connectedness (CO), Hope Transcendent (HT), and Experiences of Sense and Meaning (SM). This structure was confirmed in the initial development and subsequent validation of the English and Farsi versions, supporting the scale’s robust underlying theoretical model. The items loading onto each factor are carefully balanced, with several factors employing inverse-coded items to mitigate acquiescence bias.

Instrument

Test Type: Self-report questionnaire / Inventory

Format: 48 items, answered on a six-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“totally disagree”) to 6 (“totally agree”). Inverse scoring is applied to items marked with an asterisk (*).

Language Available: German (Original), English (MI-RSWB-E), Farsi.

Population Group: General population, College students, Clinical populations (e.g., substance use disorders), Elders.

Age Group: Adolescents through Adults/Elders.

Population Details: Has been validated successfully in student samples (British and Iranian college students) and clinical samples.

Test Methodology: Summed scores are calculated for each of the six subscales, and a total score (Total) reflects overall religious/spiritual well-being. Items marked with an asterisk are reverse-scored before summation.

Keywords

Spiritual health, psychological well-being, psychometric scale, death anxiety, substance use disorders, coping styles, General Religiosity.

Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: Unknown/Not provided in source material.

Affiliation Email addresses: Unknown/Not provided in source material.

Correspondence Address: Unknown/Not provided in source material.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Test Year: Initial concept/development 2005 (Unterrainer); English version publication 2012 (Unterrainer et al.).

Permissions and Fee: Information regarding formal usage fees is not provided in the source material. The instrument and detailed psychometric properties are published in open-access academic literature, suggesting potential availability for research purposes. The original PDF of the 2012 publication detailing the English version can be downloaded here: http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/3/3/588/pdf.

Reference’s

• Unterrainer, H. F. (2005). Spiritualitat & psychische ErkranKung. Unveroffentlichter Projectantrag. Medinizische Universitat Graz, Universitatsklinik fur Psychiatrie.
• Unterrainer, H. F. (2007). The concept of religious– spiritual well-being: The construction of a questionnaire and first results. Article presented in The 2nd National Congress on Religious and Mental Health. Tehran Psychiatric Institute, Iran University of Medical Science.
• Unterrainer, H. F., Ladenhauf, K. H., Moazedi, M.L., Wallner-Liebmann, S. J., & Fink, A. (2010). Dimensions of religious/spiritual well-bing and their relation to personality and psychological well-being. Personality and Individual Differences, 49, 192-197.
• Alilu, M. M., Zarean, M., Beyrami, M., Hashemi, T., Elhami Asl, M., Aayat Mehr, Fatemeh. (2011). Psychometric properties of farsi version of Multidimensional Inventory for Religious-Spiritual Well-Being (MI RSWB 48). Contemporary Psychology, 6(1): 23-36.
• Unterrainer, Human-Friedrich., Nelson, Oliver., Collicutt, Joanna., Fink, Andreas. (2012). The English Version of the Multidimensional Inventory for Religious/Spiritual Well-Being (MI-RSWB-E): First Results from British College Students. Religions, 3(3), 588–599; doi:10.3390/rel3030588.
• Unterrainer, Human-Friedrich., Lewis, Andrew., Collicutt, Joanna & Fink, Andreas. (2013). Religious/Spiritual Well-Being, Coping Styles, and Personality Dimensions in People With Substance Use Disorders. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 23(3): 204-213.
• Bahrami, Fazel., Dadfar, Mahboubeh., Unterrainer, Human-Friedrich., Zarean, Mostafa. (2014). Religious Spiritual Well-Being in College Students: A Cross-Cultural Study. Shefaye Khatam, 2(1):139-139.
• Dadfar, Mahboubeh., Bahrami, Fazel., Sheybani Noghabi, Farshad., Askari, Malek. (2016). Relationship Between Religious Spiritual Well-Being and Death Anxiety in Iranian Elders. International Journal of Medical Research & Health Sciences, 5(6):283-287.

Items of the Multidimensional Inventory for Religious/Spiritual Well-Being (MI-RSWB)

IMPORTANT: The following scale items must be preserved in their original language and must not be changed in any way.

1. My faith gives me a feeling of security. (GR)
2. There are things which I cannot forgive.* (FO)
3. I view the future with optimism. (HI)
4. I have experienced the feeling of being absorbed into something greater. (CO)
5. I often think about the fact that I will have to leave behind my loved ones.* (HT)
6. I have experienced true (authentic) feelings. (SM)
7. It is possible for me to find contentment in intimate conversations with God. (GR)
8. There are people whom I hate.* (FO)
9. I think that things will improve in the future. (HI)
10. I believe that I will be reborn after my death. (CO)
11. I would do anything to prolong the lives of those I love.* (HT)
12. I have experienced deep affection. (SM)
13. I will be able to overcome all problems with God’s help. (GR)
14. There are people whom I will never be able to forgive.* (FO)
15. I think my life is moving in the right direction. (HI)
16. There are people with whom I feel a supernatural connection. (CO)
17. It is hard for me to think that my loved ones will one day no longer live.* (HT)
18. I have experienced true friendship. (SM)
19. In certain moments in my life, I feel very close to God. (GR)
20. There are things which people should not forgive.* (FO)
21. I think that I will have more positive than negative experiences in the future. (HI)
22. I have had experiences through which I have realized that nothing ever dies. (CO)
23. I am terrified of being forgotten after my death.* (HT)
24. I have often experienced openness and honesty. (SM)
25. With God’s help, I will be happy once again. (GR)
26. If somebody hurts me, I usually try to get revenge.* (FO)
27. I think that I will live my life in the future just as I envisage it. (HI)
28. I believe in further existence after death. (CO)
29. I would do anything to prolong my life.* (HT)
30. I have experienced things which I want to experience again and again. (SM)
31. I know that God is merciful. (GR)
32. The thought of seeing my enemies suffer satisfies me.* (FO)
33. I have a precise picture of what my future should be like. (HI)
34. I have experienced things which I cannot express in words. (CO)
35. I am scared about what will happen to me after my death.* (HT)
36. I have often had experiences which have deeply affected me. (SM)
37. I enjoy attending to religious community events. (GR)
38. There are people who deserve to be treated badly.* (FO)
39. My future seems to be extremely uncertain.* (HI)
40. I have experienced things which radiate a special kind of energy. (CO)
41. All hope ends with death.* (HT)
42. In my experience, it is possible for me to become so involved in something that I forget everything around me. (SM)
43. I feel the presence of God in nature. (GR)
44. I have forgiven those people who have hurt me. (FO)
45. I believe that the future holds exciting challenges for me. (HI)
46. I believe that I will have experiences in the future to which very few people have access. (CO)
47. I fear being made accountable for the things I have done wrong after my death.* (HT)
48. I have had one or more experiences in which the meaning of life became clear to me. (SM)