Development and psychometric evaluation of the Clericalism Observer Rating Scale.

Abstract

To date, there has been little conceptual study of clericalism in Roman Catholic priests. To add to the understanding of this issue, in a series of 3 studies, we investigated the reliability and validity of the Clericalism Observer Rating Scale (CORS), a psychological measure of clericalism in Roman Catholic Priests, and offered a theory to understand clericalism. In Study 1, we created items, secured expert review of them, and used data from an Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) sample of Catholics (N ϭ 1,600) to evaluate the structure of the instrument. Exploratory factor analysis yielded an instrument with 3 factors and 24 items. The factor structure was replicated in another MTurk sample of Catholics (N ϭ 206; Study 2) through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using structural equation modeling. We successfully tested a second order latent factor through an alternative structural equation CFA model and found that a full-scale CORS score could be validly measured along with 3 subscale scores. In Study 3, we used MTurk sample (N ϭ 206) to test the convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity of the CORS and found evidence of construct validity for the CORS. Suggestions for using CORS as an instrument for screening candidates for priestly formation and for remediation efforts in working with clerical priests are discussed.