Table of Contents

Variable:

The Inventory of Religious Belief Scale measures belief in traditional Christian dogma. The authors acknowledge that several factors establish Christian identity and their instrument measures one-belief. Fifteen items in a Likert-like format mea sure beliefs about such issues as the inspiration of Scripture, the nature of human beings, life after death, the Trinity, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, the implications of believing in Jesus, and the eventual return of Jesus Christ. Brown and Lowe included a variety of belief items, anticipating that people would vary in the degree to which they embrace all of traditional Christian dogma.

Description:

Of the 15 items that make up the Inventory of Religious Belief, 8 of the items are aimed in a fundamental or traditional direction. The other 7 items are worded in a more liberal direction. Often, a concept is captured in 2 items, with one being traditionally worded and the other liberally worded.

Participants respond to the items on a 5- point scale. These response options include (a) strongly agree, (b) agree, (c) not sure, (d) disagree, and (e) strongly disagree. The instrument does a good job of measuring beliefs that have traditionally been identified with the conservative branch of the Christian church. However, there are a few items that tap divisive issues within the church, is sues on which Christians in good con science have disagreed. For example, there are items that measure belief in the in errancy of Scripture and belief in the uniqueness of humans from the animal kingdom. Thus, as acknowledged by the authors, the instrument is mainly aimed at conservative Christianity and does not capture the entire Christian spectrum.

Practical Considerations:

Liberally worded items are reverse scored and a score ranging from I to 5 is given to all the items. The lowest score is given to responses that indi cate liberalism, or nonbelief, and the highest score is given to responses that indicate conservatism. The scores for the individual items are then summed to produce an over all score that can range from a high of 75 to a low of 15. The hypothetical midpoint is 45. The instructions for using the instrument are clear enough that researchers should have no problems using it in their own work.

Norms/Standardization:

In the study by Brown and Lowe, the inventory was given to 887 male and female university students. Of these students, 622 were members of Protestant churches or were not church members but had Protestant backgrounds. Overall, the mean score for these individuals was 47.16 and the standard deviation was 12.33. When these students were di vided into denominational groups, the sample sizes, means, and standard deviations were the following: (a) Baptists (n = 38, mean = 59.76, SD = 10.5), (b) Lutherans (n = 27, mean = 53.43, SD = 11.82), (c) Presbyterians (n = 70, mean= 51.99, SD= 11.91), (d) Congregationalists (n = 21, mean = 49.44, SD = 11.58), (e) Methodists (n = 126, mean = 49.11, SD = 10.02), (f) Episcopalians (n = 47, mean = 44.82, SD= 9.63), and (f) nonchurch members (n = 209, mean = 40.8, SD = 10.65).

Within this same group of university stu dents, there were also 122 Catholics and 44 other students who were raised in a Catholic background. For those students who were members of the Catholic Church, the aver age score was 58.20 and the standard deviation was 8.61. For those students who were raised in a Catholic background but were not members of the church, the average score was 39.82 and the standard deviation was 8.74.

Reliability:

Brown and Lowe estimated the reliability of the inventory by looking at the responses of 100 students randomly selected from the first 300 university students they surveyed. Using a split-half procedure, responses for half the items (randomly chosen) were correlated with the other half of the items to produce a reliability coefficient of .77. When the Spearman-Brown formula was used, the reliability coefficient changed to .87.

Validity:

Brown and Lowe reported s!5’Veral attempts to assure the validity of their inventory. First, the items were reviewed by the dean of a Bible college. Second, the inventory was given to 35 students at a Bible college and 21 students at a liberal theological semi nary. The mean score for the Bible college students was 73.8, whereas the mean score for the students at the liberal seminary was 48.6. Further, there was no overlap between the distributions of scores for these two groups of students. And, finally, when the inventory was given to over 887 university stu dents, scores on the inventory correlated positively with frequency of prayer, Bible reading, church attendance, and contributions to the church.

Virkler (l 979) surveyed 54 active Christian pastors from northern and southern American cities. In the process of collecting these surveys, Virkler had the pastors indi cate their theological orientation (from liberal to conservative) and respond to the Inventory of Religious Belief. The correlation between self-defined theological orientation (with conservative self-labels given higher scores) and the inventory was .74.