Attitudes Toward Christian Women Scale

Abstract

The Attitudes Toward Christian Women Scale (ACWS) is a 34-item psychological instrument developed to quantify the degree of patriarchal Christian beliefs held by adult women. It operates on a 6-point Likert continuum. The items were systematically derived from historical and modern theological literature concerning the roles of women within the family, church, and community structures. The scale is organized into five independent subscales, which utilize 23 of the total items, allowing for separate scoring of specific dimensions of gender role beliefs. The ACWS was initially hypothesized to be useful in exploring the link between these religious beliefs and issues like domestic violence.

Keywords

Attitudes Toward Christian Women Scale, ACWS, patriarchal beliefs, Christian theology, religious attitudes, gender roles, female submission, efficacy, martyrdom, God’s nature, Likert scale.

Authors

L. E. Postovoit

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitudes Toward Christian Women Scale (ACWS) is to provide a standardized measurement of deeply held patriarchal Christian beliefs concerning the status and roles of women. This measurement tool addresses the complexity of these beliefs by assuming they are multidimensional, covering aspects ranging from personal independence to theological interpretations of God’s nature.

A key secondary objective identified during the scale’s initial development was to use the resulting scores to illuminate potential relationships between highly traditional, hierarchical gender role beliefs rooted in Christian doctrine and the occurrence or tolerance of behaviors such as domestic violence within heterosexual relationships.

Construct

The ACWS measures the construct of patriarchal Christian beliefs through five hypothesized independent dimensions, allowing researchers to assess nuanced differences in traditional versus egalitarian views. The full scale consists of 34 items, but only 23 are grouped into the specific subscales, with each item belonging to only one subscale. Because the subscales are independent, their scores can be summed separately, or all 34 items can be totaled to achieve an overall score reflecting general patriarchal attitudes.

The five measured subscales are:

• Female Physical and Emotional Independence
• Female Submissiveness and Guilt (Relating to roles and blame)
• Female Innate and Demonstrated Efficacy (Relating to competence and leadership)
• Martyrdom (Relating to self-sacrifice and suffering for faith)
• God’s Nature (Relating to the theological gender characteristics of God)

Validity

The ACWS demonstrates strong face validity, as each of the 34 statements is clearly identifiable as representing either a patriarchal or an egalitarian perspective on women’s roles within the family, church, and society. This ease of interpretation means the scale appears, at face value, to measure what it intends to measure.

To establish content validity, the author employed a rigorous review process. An initial pool of statements, derived from theological materials on Christian womanhood, was reviewed by three doctoral students specializing in both theology of women and domestic violence. Following this expert review, the items were administered to six women who were subsequently interviewed to gather impressions and ensure clarity, leading to revisions that formed the final version of the scale.

Construct validity was assessed by correlating the ACWS scores with an established instrument, the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS) short form, which measures conservative/traditional versus liberal/egalitarian female behavior. The results showed that, with the exception of the Female Submission and Guilt subscale, all ACWS subscales correlated significantly with the overall score of the AWS short form, supporting the conclusion that the ACWS effectively measures religious gender role beliefs that are indicative of expectations and behavior in heterosexual relationships.

Reliability

The initial reliability procedures focused primarily on the empirical grouping of items into the five subscales. Pearson product-moment intercorrelations were calculated across all 34 items. A stringent minimum correlation coefficient of 0.6 between items was mandated for selection and inclusion in a subscale. This method resulted in the creation of five subscales, utilizing 23 of the 34 original statements.

It is important to note that specific coefficients for internal consistency reliability (such as Cronbach’s Alpha) for the overall scale or its individual subscales were not reported in the initial publication (Postovoit, 1990).

Factor Analysis

While formal exploratory or confirmatory factor analysis was not explicitly detailed, the underlying structure of the ACWS was determined through an empirical item grouping methodology based on inter-item correlations. This process required a minimum correlation of 0.6 for items to cluster together into a subscale.

This structural approach resulted in the creation of five conceptually independent subscales, where no single item is represented in more than one subscale. This independence validates the assumption that patriarchal beliefs are multidimensional, allowing researchers to measure and analyze the different facets of these gender role beliefs separately.

Instrument

Test Type: Self-report questionnaire / Psychological scale

Format: 34 items scored on a 6-point Likert continuum. Response options are typically graded levels of agreement/disagreement.

Language Available: English (The initial standardization sample was English-speaking)

Population Group: Adult Christian women

Age Group: 18 to 65 years old

Population Details: The initial standardization utilized fifty subjects personally recruited from the greater Los Angeles area. The sample was intentionally diverse, encompassing various ethnic, educational, occupational, and Christian denominational backgrounds. A key inclusion criterion was that participants needed to be currently involved in a heterosexual relationship for a minimum duration of one year.

Test Methodology: The scale does not require specialized training for administration or scoring. Statements are presented, and respondents indicate their level of agreement on the 6-point scale. Scoring is achieved by summing the scores of the 23 items belonging to the five subscales, or by totaling the responses of all 34 items for an overall patriarchal score.

Keywords

Psychometrics, Christian attitudes, gender role beliefs, marital roles, Los Angeles sample, Postovoit (1990), scale development, religious fundamentalism.

Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: Not available in source material.

Affiliation Email addresses: Not available in source material.

Correspondence Address: Not available in source material.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Test Year: 1990

Permissions and Fees: Information regarding current licensing, permissions, or associated fees is not available in the original publication abstract. Researchers should contact the original author, L. E. Postovoit, or the publisher, Journal of Psychology and Christianity, for current usage rights.

Reference’s

Postovoit, L. E. (1990). The attitudes toward Christian women scale (ACWS): Initial efforts towards the development of an instrument measuring patriarchal beliefs. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 2, 65- 72.

Subsequent Research: As of the original publication note, there was no further research available on this instrument.

Items of the ATTITUDES TOWARD CHRISTIAN WOMEN SCALE

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

1. Males are the correct ministers of God’s word because both God and Jesus Christ are men.
2. Wives are commanded to honor their husbands as the head of the family.
3. There may be reasons besides adultery which make divorce the right decision for a Christian wife.
4. When sexual passion gets “out of hand,” it’s usually the woman’s fault.
5. Woman is subservient to man because she came out of his rib.
6. The woman should never desire to teach the man but should always learn from him in subjection and quiet submission.
7. Women were considered as important as men by Jesus Christ during his ministry on earth.
8. Both husband and wife are equals in the family, the community, and the church.
9. Wives and husbands are commanded to treat each other as equals in mutual submission.
10. If a woman is unhappy in her subordinate role, she shows her sinful nature.
11. Man’s superior strength and common sense show he’s more in the image of God than is woman.
12. If a husband gets angry with his home situation, it is his wife’s fault for not preventing the problem.
13. God calls women to be more humble and submissive to their husbands than their husbands are to them.
14. In marriage, both the husband the wife should make the important decisions, with both having the final word.
15. Adam and Eve were made absolutely equal, out of the same substance.
16. The Bible shows that Christian women can be prophets, leaders, wives, and mothers.
17. It is acceptable for a woman to preach in the church.
18. A Christian woman is disgraced if she is divorced because it shows she has failed.
19. In the Old and New Testaments, God is spoken of as having female as well as male characteristics.
20. A woman’s salvation will come through her husband.
21. A Christian wife is not responsible for her husband’s behavior or feelings.
22. The wife follows her husband’s leadership to achieve greater Christian unity in their marriage.
23. Husbands and wives have God-given rights to discipline each other.
24. The Bible uses female symbols for God and Jesus Christ.
25. A Christian woman should be subject even to her non-Christian husband so he will be won over by her meek and quiet spirit.
26. A Christian marriage should be based on equality between the husband and wife.
27. Christian husbands are given the right to discipline their Christian wives as necessary to keep them on the Christian path, but wives are not granted the same rights by God.
28. It is all right for a Christian woman to be divorced.
29. God’s image and personality are seen equally in the forms of the female and the male.
30. God grants a special blessing to wives who give up their desires for their husbands because these women are living in accordance with God’s plan for the family.
31. Adam and Eve are equally responsible for the origin of sin.
32. God intends for women to be free from the emotional burden which comes from the responsibility of leadership.
33. The Bible states that the equality of males and females is the Christian ideal.
34. A Christian woman should divorce her husband only if he is unfaithful to her.

Subscale Item Groupings (23 items):

• Subscale 1: Female Physical and Emotional Independence (Items 2, 3, 14, 22, 25, and 28)
• Subscale 2: Female Submissiveness and Guilt (Items 6, 11, 12, and 13)
• Subscale 3: Female Efficacy (Items 7, 8, 9, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 33)
• Subscale 4: Female Submissiveness and Guilt (Items 30 and 32)
• Subscale 5: Female Submissiveness and Guilt (Items 19 and 24)

The scale utilizes a 6-point response format, which, though not explicitly defined in the source, is presumed to be a Likert scale ranging from strong disagreement to strong agreement.