Construction of a religious identity status questionnaire

Abstract

This study presents a construction and psychometric evaluation of the Religious Identity Status Questionnaire -RISQ for the assessment of the religious identity status according to Marcia's ego identity status approach. The initial item pool was generated based on Erikson's theory of psychosocial development, Marcia's ego identity status approach and interviews with adolescents and young adults. A factor analysis of the initial item pool was performed on data obtained from a sample of 394 secondary school and university students from Serbia to select items for the questionnaire. Validity of the questionnaire was examined on a sample of 1155 subjects. The results of the CFA suggest that subscales of the RISQ measure four factors corresponding to the identity statuses of Marcia's model. Correlations with ideological identity subscales of the EOM-EIS-2 suggest the convergent validity of the questionnaire. Configural measurement invariance was established for gender and denominational groups. Metric invariance was established for gender and among orthodox and catholic participants, whereas scalar invariance was established for gender, but not for denominational groups. Highlights:• The RISQ is based on Marcia's ego identity status model. and allows the assessment of religious ego identity status. • Results support construct and convergent validity of the RISQ. • Gender groups show full scalar invariance, while only configural invariance is supported for denominational groups.

Civic Identity in Emerging Adulthood

“…Stemming from Marcia’s paradigm, similar scales were also constructed to afford insights into developmental aspects of specific identity domains, for example, financial (e.g., Bosch et al., 2016; Sorgente et al., 2020) and religious (Stojković et al, 2020). These scales demonstrated validity and relevance in studying identity-related outcomes.…”