‘Generic’ Versus ‘Mature’ Measures of Christian Religiosity : Comparing two Quantitative Measures of Religiosity

Abstract

A wide range of survey-based tools has been developed to measure religiosity, although the most commonly applied approaches tend to focus on 'generic' interpretations of religiosity for practical and generalising reasons. However, these generic approaches have not always been satisfactory due to the lack of variation in responses and the potential for poor correlation between the generic religiosity measure and the overall impact of faith in respondents' lives, particularly in less secular contexts. This led us to explore whether there is a difference between measuring religiosity using a 'generic' versus a 'mature' approach using 227 Christian respondents on Bantayan Island, the Philippines. The findings suggest that overall religiosity among our respondents was high for both measures, that the measures are strongly correlated, and that there was no statistically significant difference between the scores for each scale; however, there was evidence to suggest that the two scales are examining different dimensions of religiosity. When correlating the two religiosity scores to other scales on our survey, there was no statistically significant difference among the correlations when using the mature or generic measure of religiosity. This has important implications for mental health and care research methodologies, for which we highlight the importance of using contextually appropriate measures that incorporate various dimensions of religiosity.