Religious Emphasis Scale

Abstract

The Religious Emphasis Scale (RES) is a psychological scale designed to quantify the perceived extent to which an individual’s parents emphasized the family religion during the respondent’s upbringing. Developed initially by Altemeyer (1981) and revised in 1988, the common version consists of 10 items scored using a 6-point response format ranging from 0 (none at all) to 5 (a great deal). The total score is calculated by summing the scores of the 10 items. The RES was conceived as a measure relevant to the study of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and its relationship to religious socialization.

Keywords

Religious Emphasis Scale, RES, religious socialization, parental influence, Altemeyer, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, psychometrics, religion, family systems

Authors

Bob Altemeyer, B. Hunsberger

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Religious Emphasis Scale (RES) is to measure the retrospective perception of parental religious emphasis and practice within the home environment during the respondent’s formative years. It quantifies the degree of religious salience experienced by the individual.

The scale was developed specifically to investigate the origins and correlates of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). Altemeyer posited that high levels of parental religious emphasis might contribute to the development of authoritarian tendencies and traditional religious adherence, providing a measure of the environmental inputs related to these constructs.

Construct

The RES measures the psychological construct of Religious Socialization Load, defined as the intensity and frequency of religious behaviors, discussions, and observations emphasized by parents in the family setting. This construct is operationalized through 10 specific behaviors related to participation (church attendance, youth groups), ritual (praying, reading scripture), and moral instruction (discussing “do’s and don’t’s”).

The scale assumes that the degree of parental emphasis placed on these overt religious practices is a key predictor of later religious and social attitudes. The revised 10-item scale focuses on observable practices rather than internal beliefs, making it a powerful measure of the religious environment experienced by the child.

Validity

The Religious Emphasis Scale demonstrates strong evidence of both convergent and discriminant validity, particularly in relation to measures of religious orientation and political attitudes.

In samples of university students and their parents, the RES showed significant positive correlations in the expected directions with key psychological measures. For the student and parent samples, respectively, correlations were: Right-Wing Authoritarianism (.37, .30), Religious Pressures (.59, .43), Fullerton and Hunsberger’s Christian Orthodoxy Scale (.59, .49), and Allport and Ross’s Intrinsic Religious Orientation (.58, .50). Furthermore, the RES correlated strongly with a single-item measure of church attendance (.62 for students, .44 for parents).

Conversely, the RES demonstrated appropriate negative correlations with scales measuring divergent constructs, such as Religious Doubts (-.30, -.23) and Extrinsic Religious Orientation (-.20, -.15). Earlier validation work (Altemeyer, 1981) also established strong corroboration between students’ and parents’ accounts of religious emphasis, with correlations of .70 and .73 in two separate studies, indicating high inter-rater agreement on the family’s religious circumstances.

Reliability

The Religious Emphasis Scale exhibits excellent internal consistency. For the revised 10-item version utilized in Altemeyer (1988), the average inter-item correlation was .55. The resulting Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was exceptionally high at .92, a value found to be identical for both the university student sample and the parent sample, suggesting robustness across generations.

Subsequent research using an expanded 16-item version of the scale (Hunsberger & Altemeyer, 1995), often used in studies of apostates, further confirmed the scale’s reliability. The 16-item version yielded even higher internal consistency estimates, with Cronbach’s alpha values of .95 and .96 across two large samples of university students (N > 800 each), confirming the strong psychometric properties of the measure.

Factor Analysis

Although explicit factor analysis details are not provided in the original descriptive text, the extremely high internal consistency reliability (alpha = .92 for 10 items) and the use of a single total summation score strongly suggest that the Religious Emphasis Scale is conceptualized and empirically supported as a unidimensional measure of religious socialization emphasis. The high average inter-item correlation (.55) indicates that all 10 items are measuring a common underlying construct.

Instrument

Test Type: Psychological scale (Self-report, Retrospective)

Format: Paper-and-pencil measure; 10 items (or 16 items in later versions); 6-point Likert-type response scale (0 to 5).

Language Available: English (as utilized in Canadian studies).

Population Group: General population; specifically used with university students and their parents.

Age Group: Adolescent through adult samples.

Population Details: The scale was standardized using two primary samples in Canada: 513 introductory psychology students and 549 parents of those students. The samples appear suitable for use in similar Western cultures.

Test Methodology: Simple administration requiring no specialized examiner skill. Scoring involves the summation of the 10 item scores. Average scores were 17.7 for students (Variance: 161) and 25.0 for parents (Variance: 186).

Keywords

Religious socialization, parental pressure, psychometrics, Cronbach’s alpha, Canada, religious practices, Christian Orthodoxy, intrinsic religious orientation

Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: Not provided in source documentation.

Affiliation Email addresses: Not provided in source documentation.

Correspondence Address: Correspondence generally directed through the University of Manitoba (for Altemeyer).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Test Year: Original publication 1981; Revised 10-item version utilized in 1988.

Permissions/Fee: The scale items are publicly available in Altemeyer’s academic publications (1988). Standard academic citation is required for use. No fee structure is mentioned in the source material.

Reference’s

Altemeyer, B. (1988). Enemies of Freedom: Understanding right-wing authoritarianism. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. (The primary location for the revised 10-item scale, specifically pages 205-206, 214, and 218.)

Allport, G. W., & Ross, J.M. (1967). Personal religious orientation and prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5, 432-443.

Altemeyer, B. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg, Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press.

Fullerton, J. T., & Hunsberger, B. E. (1982). A unidimensional measure of Christian orthodoxy. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 21, 317-326.

Hunsberger, B., & Altemeyer, B. (1995, June). Apostates from highly religious homes: Socialization anomalies. Poster presented at the annual meetings of the Canadian Psychological Association, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Items of the RELIGIOUS EMPHASIS SCALE

After naming the particular religion in which they had been raised, participants are asked to respond to the following items, on a 0-5 basis, to indicate “how much their parents emphasized practicing the family religion while they were growing up” (Altemeyer, 1988, p. 205).

• 0 = no emphasis was placed on the behavior
• I = a slight emphasis was placed on the behavior
• 2 = a mild emphasis was placed on the behavior
• 3 = a moderate emphasis was placed on the behavior
• 4 = a strong emphasis was placed on the behavior
• 5 = a very strong emphasis was placed on the behavior

1. Going to church; attending religious services.
2. Attending “Sunday school”; getting systematic religious instruction regularly.
3. Reviewing the teachings of the religion at home.
4. Praying before meals.
5. Reading Scripture or other religious material.
6. Praying before bedtime.
7. Discussing moral “do’s” and “don’t’s” in religious terms.
8. Observing religious holidays; celebrating events like Christmas in a religious way.
9. Being a good representative of the faith; acting the way a devout member of your religion would be expected to act.
10. Taking part in religious youth groups.