Table of Contents

Variable:

The Religious Experience Questionnaire (REQ) was designed to measure personal religious experience, which refers to the experienced reality of an affective relationship with a personal, caring God. The author differentiates between this affective, experiential dimension, and the cognitive dimension of belief in a religious system or in doctrinal statements. The construct includes a sense of being heard, cared for, and forgiven by God, as well as a sense of God’s presence and of being saved. The measure is intended to assess individual, subjective experience, not group norms or values.

Description:

This scale was developed in response to the observation that traditional religious measures of orthodoxy tended to have ceiling effects in religiously commit ted populations. It emphasized the cognitive rather than the affective aspects of religion (K. J. Edwards, personal communication, August 26, 1997). It is based on the personal religious experience factor identified by King (1967), which contained items related to experiencing the effects of God’s influence on one’s personal life. Edwards’s scale was initially developed from items drawn from this factor and was later revised and expanded.

The original REQ consisted of eight items scored on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from “all the time” to “very seldom” for seven items, and from “constant fellowship” to “rare fellowship” for one item assessing the degree of experienced fellowship with God (Edwards, 1976). The scale was later revised and expanded to 12 items in order to include 4 reverse-scored items (K. J. Ed wards, personal communication, August 17, 1997). In addition, two items were reworded in order to standardize the anchors of the Likert scales, which were expanded to 7 points ranging from “never” to “always.” One item on prayer was also replaced with an item that was more relational in order to maintain the consistency of the measure’s experiential emphasis. Items 3, 5, 7, and 12 are reverse scored. The total score for the instrument is then determined by summing the responses on each item, allowing a range of 12 to 84. Alternatively, the mean of the responses may be calculated.

Practical Considerations:

The REQ is a paper-and-pencil measure that does not re quire special examiner skill for administration or interpretation. Brief instructions are provided for the test taker that emphasize the importance of answering each item based on personal experience. The purpose and rationale of the scale are clear: to assess the subjective and experiential aspects of an individual’s relationship with God. The face validity of the measure is good as all items clearly relate to the construct the scale at tempts to measure.

Norms/Standardization:

No normative data are reported in the available research on the REQ. Consequently, it is difficult to assess whether the instrument does, in fact, avoid the problem of a ceiling effect with religiously committed populations, as intended by the author. However, the fact that the scale correlates significantly with a number of measures in a number of religiously com mitted samples (e.g., college students, adults, and an inpatient clinical sample) suggests that the range is indeed wide enough to allow for research use of the instrument with religious populations.

Reliability:

No specific reliability data are available.

Validity:

Construct validity of an affective experience of God as close and loving is supported by significant positive correlations between REQ scores and loving, benevolent God images (Brokaw & Ed wards, 1994), an intrinsic-committed religious orientation, and peer ratings of the individual’s relationship to God (Wessel, 1979). Brokaw (1991) factor-analyzed the original 12 items, in addition to 16 experimental items, using a sample of 92 under graduate students from a religiously homogeneous population. The results suggest that the original 12 items load onto a single fac tor with loadings ranging from .46 to .83, thus supporting the homogeneity of the con struct.

In addition, the construct validity of the REQ is indirectly supported by a number of studies showing significant positive correlations between REQ scores and constructs involving inter- and intrapersonal affective and experiential dimensions: intrapersonal variables of positive self-concept (Day, 1980; Wessel, 1979), self-esteem (Edwards, 1977; Edwards, Goldberg, Hargrove, & Linamen, 1979), and self-adequacy (Tisdale et al., 1997); interpersonal variables of empathy (Edwards, 1977; Edwards et al., 1979; Wessel, 1979), an affiliative interpersonal style (Volker, 1981), dominance, autonomy, a friendly-dominant interpersonal style, ex pressed inclusion, expressed affection (Ed wards et al., 1979), social interest, and psychosocial maturity (Wessel, 1979); and level of object relations development (Brokaw & Edwards, 1994; Tisdale et al., 1997).