Development, refinement, and psychometric properties of the Attitudes Toward God Scale (ATGS-9).

Abstract

Perceived relationships with God can be a source of comfort or struggle. To advance the study of spiritual comfort and struggle, we develop the nine-item Attitudes toward God Scale (ATGS-9), and we describe six studies (2,992 total participants) reporting its development and psychometrics. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses identified two factors: (1) Positive Attitudes toward God and (2) Disappointment and Anger with God. Subscale scores showed good estimated internal consistency, 2-week temporal stability, and evidence for construct and discriminant validity. Positive Attitudes toward God correlated with measures of religiosity and conscientiousness. Disappointment and Anger with God correlated with negative religious coping, lower religious participation, more distress, higher neuroticism, and entitlement. These results support the ATGS-9 as a brief measure of attitudes toward God.

The Semantics of ‘Spirituality’ and Related Self-Identifications: A Comparative Study in Germany and the USA

“…The questionnaire includes, besides demographics and space for free-text entries of respondents' definitions of religion and spirituality, Hood's (1975) Mysticism Scale, the Big Five (NEO-FFI, Costa & McCrae, 1985), Granqvist's (2002) Attachment Items, Exline's Attitudes toward God Scale (Wood, Worthington, Exline, Yali, Aten, & McMinn, 2009), Ryff's Psychological Well-Being and Growth Scale (Ryff 1989;Ryff & Singer, 1998), the Loyola Generativity Scale (McAdams & de St. Aubin, 1992), and the Religious Schema Scale (Streib, Hood, & Klein, 2010). These measures allow further profiling of self-identifications and their correlates.…”

Anger toward God(s) Among Undergraduates in India

“…(Note, however, that restriction of age ranges in undergraduate samples limits available evidence of age differences in anger toward God.) Prior studies have not shown consistent associations with gender, ethnicity, or religiousness (Exline et al 2011;Wood et al 2010). Granted, people who are more religious are more likely to see God as the cause of events in general (e.g., Gorsuch and Smith 1983;Weeks and Lupfer 2000), including negative events (Gray and Wegner 2010;Hale-Smith et al 2012); however, they typically see God's intent as positive, which attenuates or at least dilutes angry feelings to some degree (Exline et al 2011;Wilt et al 2017).…”

“…Typically, those in the U.S. who believe in God report emotions about God that are much more positive than negative (Exline et al 2011;Wood et al 2010), even in contexts involving serious suffering, such as chronic pain or the terminal illness of a loved one ). Positive and negative emotions involving God usually show weak to moderate negative associations (e.g., Exline et al 2011;Wood et al 2010).…”

“…Typically, those in the U.S. who believe in God report emotions about God that are much more positive than negative (Exline et al 2011;Wood et al 2010), even in contexts involving serious suffering, such as chronic pain or the terminal illness of a loved one ). Positive and negative emotions involving God usually show weak to moderate negative associations (e.g., Exline et al 2011;Wood et al 2010). This finding fits easily with prior work suggesting that positive and negative emotions are better represented by two separate dimensions (each ranging from neutral to intensely positive or negative) than by opposite endpoints of a single dimension (e.g., Watson et al 1988).…”

Protocol for a Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial to Compare the “Taste & See” Programme—A Church-Based Programme to Develop a Healthy Relationship with Food—With a Wait-List Control

“…Religiosity using the centrality of religiosity scale, CRS-5, which contains one question on each of the centrality of religion dimensions which are scored on a frequency scale of 1 to 5 (Huber and Huber 2012). Attitude towards a deity will be measured using the ATG-S 9 (Wood et al 2010). Attachment to God, which has been commonly used and associated with disordered eating (Homan and Boyatzis 2010) and body image (Homan 2012), will be measured using the Attachment to God Scale (Rowatt and Kirkpatrick 2002) this is briefer than the Attachment to God Inventory (Beck and McDonald 2004).…”