A random sample of 989 adults in an Australian community survey completed the Bradburn Balanced Affect Scale together with three measures of Christian faith and practice: belief in God, personal prayer, and church attendance. The data demonstrated a positive association between all three religious measures and psychological well-being. The analysis helps to account for discrepant findings in previous research.Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning academic and popular interest in the relationship between religiosity, health, and psychological well-being as evidenced, for example, by a 1998 symposium on religion, health, and well-being edited and introduced by Ellison (1998). Reviews that try to integrate and synthesize findings from disparate empirical studies concerned with the relationship between religion and well-being face two key problems. The first problem is quite transparent and generally well recognized in reviews of appropriate psychological tests (Robinson, Shaver, and Wrightsman 1991; Maltby, Lewis, and Hill 2000). This problem is that different tests may measure quite different aspects of the broad notion of well-being and religiosity may relate to different aspects of well-being in different ways. The second problem is less transparent and less well documented. This problem is that the same tests of well-being may be handled in different ways. The aim of the present article is to illustrate this second problem by reference to the Bradburn Balanced Affect Scale.The Bradburn Balanced Affect Scale proposed by Bradburn (1969) has been widely applied and tested (Bowling 1991). In the theoretical basis underpinning this instrument, Bradburn proposed a two-dimensional model of psychological well-being, distinguishing between positive affect and negative affect. In Bradburn's original studies these two dimensions of psychological well-being were uncorrelated, leading him to the view that the best indicator of an individual's overall feelings of well-being would be provided by the difference between positive affect and negative affect. According to this view, an individual who scored high on positive affect and low on negative affect would enjoy the highest overall level of psychological well-being, while an individual who scored low on positive affect and high on negative affect would suffer the lowest overall level of psychological well-being. This view gave rise to the notion of balanced affect, and produced a third score from the Bradburn questionnaire. The real interest in Bradburn's theoretical model of psychological well-being resides in the measure of balanced affect.During the past three decades the Bradburn Balanced Affect Scale has been employed in six very different studies concerned with the relationship between religion and psychological well-being. The lack of clear consensus to emerge from these studies may be attributed, at least in part, to differences in the ways findings have been reported in respect of positive affect, negative affect, and balanced affect. Different methods of report...

This study assesses the Oswald Clergy Burnout Scale (OCBI), the psychometric properties of which have not been previously described. Analysis of responses from a large number (N = 3,012) of ministers in charge of Australian congregations showed that the scale's internal reliability was satisfactory, and that the scale could be represented by two factors, identified as the personal and social aspects of burnout respectively. This structure was supported by confirmatory factor analysis. Several demographic and job-related variables that might relate to burnout were regressed on the total, personal and social factor scores. Age is the predominant (negative) predictor of burnout as measured by the total scale and the personal factor scores. All variables predict burnout as measured by the social factor.However, in all models, the predictor variables account for no more than 5% of the total variance. These findings suggest that demographic factors and working conditions are poor predictors of burnout among clergy.

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