SPIRITUAL THEMES AND RELIGIOUS RESPONSES TEST

Abstract

The Spiritual Themes and Religious Responses Test (STARR) is a unique projective instrument developed to gather data concerning an individual’s general spiritual and religious experiences. It is structurally modeled after the widely recognized Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), utilizing ambiguous stimuli to access both conscious and unconscious material. The STARR employs 11 black-and-white stimulus cards depicting individuals in postures interpretable as prayerful. These ambiguous photographs are designed to encourage the projection of the subject’s internal thoughts, emotions, conflicts, and concerns related to universal themes such as grief, joy, solitude, and family relatedness, particularly within a religious context.

The test is highly adaptable, allowing administrators to use various instructional sets to focus on specific dimensions of religious experience, including Representation of God, relationship with God, religious symbols, and prayer descriptions. The STARR is primarily intended to assess unconscious aspects of religious development, a topic often discussed in psychoanalytic literature but seldom adequately tested.

Keywords

Projective Test, Spiritual Assessment, Religious Responses, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), God Representation, Prayer, Spiritual Development, Unconscious Material, Religious Psychology, STARR.

Authors

Marilyn S. Saur, W. G. Saur.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Spiritual Themes and Religious Responses Test (STARR) is to serve as a diagnostic and research tool for generating data about an individual’s spiritual disposition and religious life. The instrument is specifically designed to elicit material that is often inaccessible through traditional self-report measures, focusing on both the conscious and unconscious material related to faith and religious experience.

A key objective for the authors was addressing gaps in testing related to the unconscious dimensions of God Representation and religious development. Depending on the instructional set employed, the STARR can be tailored to investigate specific variables, making it adaptable for both clinical assessment (e.g., in psychotherapy or spiritual direction) and focused academic research.

Construct

The STARR is founded on the core psychoanalytic assumption that individuals project their internal strivings, dispositions, and conflicts onto ambiguous visual stimuli. The construct measured is the subject’s internal organization of spiritual and religious experience, particularly how they relate to the divine and the religious world. The test also commonly reflects self and object representations.

The instrument taps into several specific dimensions of religious and spiritual life, which can be categorized based on the scoring system used:

• Thematic Categories (Instructional Set I): Religious institutions, representation of God, nature of the world, life themes, religious symbols, prayer, and dependency.
• Relational Categories (Instructional Set II): Prayer descriptions, self representations, object representations, and relationship to God.
• Misner’s Spiritual Development Scale (Quantitative Scoring): Twelve dimensions including psychological mindedness, identification with others, capacity for mature relatedness, affect prior to and following prayer, world view, degree of resolution experienced following prayer, attachment style, coping style, type of prayer, type of need expressed, and theological theme expressed.

Validity

As is common with projective instruments, determining the psychometric validity of the STARR has been addressed in a limited but focused manner. The authors initially focused on the test’s capacity to access material outside of the subject’s conscious awareness. Initial data indicated that subjects’ responses often reflected religious affective content that had been unconscious prior to the testing process (Saur & Saur, 1993b), suggesting a degree of psychological depth.

The most substantial evidence for validity comes from C. Misner’s (1994/1995) study, which sought to establish concurrent validity using the Misner Spiritual Development Scale to quantitatively score the STARR. Misner correlated STARR scores with established measures of psychological and religious functioning, including the Age Universal Intrinsic-Extrinsic Scale, the Quest Scale, the MMPI-2, and the Rorschach Egocentricity Index. Highly notable findings included significant correlations (ranging from .36 to .58) between the Intrinsic Scale (measuring genuine religious commitment) and seven of Misner’s STARR subscales, such as psychological mindedness, identification with others, capacity for mature relatedness, and attachment style. These findings support the conclusion that the STARR is useful for measuring an individual’s capacity for and style of religious relating, both to God and to others, as well as several other religious and psychological variables.

Reliability

Reliability data for the STARR is sparse, primarily limited to measures of interscorer agreement for quantitative scoring methods. Due to the test’s projective nature and the fact that different cards are intended to tap varying aspects of religious experience, standard internal consistency measures (like Cronbach’s alpha) are considered inappropriate or unfeasible for the instrument.

The most reliable data pertains to the quantitative scoring system developed by Misner (1994/1995). Following rigorous rater training, the reported interscorer reliability showed a wide range, indicating variability across subscales. Reliability coefficients ranged from a low of .46 for the subscale measuring the ‘type of need expressed’ to a high of .88 for subscales such as ‘psychological mindedness’ and ‘identification with others.’ No other forms of reliability (e.g., test-retest) have been determined for the STARR at this time.

Factor Analysis

Formal factor analysis of the STARR scale structure has not been widely reported, largely because the primary interpretation methodology suggested by the authors is qualitative and thematic, focused on content analysis rather than latent variable structure.

However, subsequent quantitative research has utilized structured scoring systems based on thematic factors. For instance, Spear (1993) scored responses based on factors derived from Gorsuch’s Adjective Ratings of God, while Ozorak and Kosiewicz (1994) coded responses for predefined themes such as separation and connectedness, power and love, and the nature and focus of prayers. Misner’s quantitative scale defined 12 specific dimensions of spirituality, which function as measurable factors, although these dimensions were developed for scoring responses rather than derived from an exploratory factor analysis of the instrument’s stimulus cards.

Instrument

Test Type: Projective instrument (Thematic Apperception Test model)

Format: 11 black-and-white stimulus cards (photographs of people in postures that may be construed as prayerful)

Language Available: English (Original development language)

Population Group: Adults and College Students

Age Group: Typically 18+ (Studies included adults aged 28 to 51 and college students)

Population Details: Limited normative data gathered from diverse religious and secular groups, including those active in conservative Jewish congregations, the Episcopal Church, Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches, as well as students from various liberal arts colleges.

Test Methodology: Administration involves presenting subjects with a minimum of 8 cards and asking them to tell a story (Instructional Set I) or describe a prayer (Instructional Set II). Administration takes approximately 45 minutes. Interpretation requires specific training in projective testing and may utilize qualitative thematic analysis or quantitative scoring systems (e.g., Misner Spiritual Development Scale).

Keywords

Psychological Mindedness, Attachment Style, Religious Institutions, Unconscious Affect, Rater Training, Misner Spiritual Development Scale, Quantitative Scoring, Psychoanalysis and Religion.

Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: Not provided in source material.

Affiliation Email addresses: Not provided in source material.

Correspondence Address: Marilyn Saur, 907 Cedar Fork Trail, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-1706.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The original publication of the preliminary manual for the STARR was in 1993 (Saur & Saur, 1993a). Use of this test requires explicit permission and approval from the author, Marilyn Saur. It is strongly advised that the test be administered and interpreted only by individuals trained in the application of projective testing.

Reference’s

The following references document the scale’s development, theoretical background, and subsequent use:

• Jones, J. W. (1991). Contemporary psychoanalysis and religion. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• McDargh, J. (1983). Psychoanalytic object relations theory and the study of religion. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
• Meissner, W. W. (1984). Psychoanalysis and religious experience. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Misner, C. (1995). The construction and preliminary validation of a spiritual development scale for coding a projective technique of spirituality and prayer (Doctoral dissertation, Central Michigan University, 1994). Dissertation Abstracts International, 56, 6006B.
• Ozorak, E. W., & Kosiewicz, J. D. (1994, November). The relationship of self-schema to religious schemas and behaviors. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Albuquerque, NM.
• Rizzuto, A. (1979). The birth of the living God. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Saur, M. S., & Saur, W. G. (1993a). Spiritual Themes and Religious Responses Test (STARR): Preliminary Manual. Chapel Hill, NC: Author.
• Saur, M. S., & Saur, W. G. (1993b). Transitional phenomena as evidenced in prayer. Journal of Religion and Health, 32, 55-65.
• Spear, K. (1993). Conscious and pre-conscious God-concepts: An object relations perspective. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Graduate School of Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA.

Items of the SPIRITUAL THEMES AND RELIGIOUS RESPONSES TEST

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

The STARR is composed of 11 black-and-white stimulus cards (photographs). The “items” are the prompts used in conjunction with these cards to elicit responses. The two primary instructional sets are:

Instructional Set I (Thematic Storytelling): The administrator states interest in studying prayer, then presents each card and asks the subject to tell a story describing:

1. What is happening in the situation.
2. What leads up to it.
3. How it ends.
4. What the main character is thinking and feeling.

Instructional Set II (Prayer Description): The administrator states, “These are photographs of people in prayer. Your task is to make up or describe the prayer.” A helpful prompt may be added: “Please talk about the prayer in the photograph.”

The authors suggest administering at least 8 of the 11 cards to ensure adequate repetition of themes.