Table of Contents

Variable:

The Short Index of Self-Actualization Scale (SISA) measures beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that are assumed to indicate a level of self-actualization. Self actualization is a dimension of personality derived from third-force, or humanistic, psychology. The best-known measure of self-actualization is the Personal Orientation Inventory (POI) (Shostrom, 1974). Research on the POI has found negative correlations between it and various measures of religiosity. Such data is taken as support for the conclusion that religious commitments interfere with self-actualization. Watson, Morris, and Hood (1990) argued that not all aspects of religiosity are inherently antiself. They observed that the negative correlation may be due to the antireligious nature of some of the items used to measure self-actualization. The authors postulate that there might be a form of self-actualizationconsis tent with the Christian faith not captured by more humanistic measures such as the POI. The authors say,

deeper conflicts may exist in understanding the word “self” in the first place. Within humanistic frameworks, the “self” tends to be an unqualified “good,” some thing to be accepted and nurtured toward its true realization, … [for believers the self is] ambivalently nuanced [However] to view the “self” as ambivalently nuanced is not to see it as wholly negative.

… proreligious elements can also be isolated within the POI and appear consistent with healthy self-functioning” (Watson et al., 1991, pp 41–41).

The Short Index of Self-Actualization (SISA, Jones & Crandall, 1986) was a pre existing scale selected by the authors to de termine if a religiously sensitive measure of self-actualization could be derived from it. They intended to call the derived variable Religious Self-Actualization.

Description:

The SISA is actually a mea sure of self-actualization, not a measure of a religious variable. However, since self-actualization deals with self-functioning, it has high relevance to religious research. The SISA was developed by Jones and Crandall (1986) as an alternative to the longer POI (150 items). It consists of 15 items, 7 positive and 8 negative, taken from the POI. Since the POI is a forced-choice inventory, the items selected for the SISA are the self actualizing “half” of POI items. The items chosen had the highest item-total correlations with the POI total score. On the SISA, respondents react to each statement by indicating their agreement or disagreement on a four point scale (see scale).

Watson et al. (1990) submitted 14 items of the SISA to a methodology designed to determine whether they were pro or anti religious (omitted from their analysis was the SISA item, “I fear failure”.) Items that could not be clearly classified as pro or anti religious were classified as neutral. Students in an introductory psychology class at a state university rated 7 positive and 7 negative items of the SISA on a 5-point scale ranging from “very consistent” to “very inconsistent” with personal religious beliefs. The students were “overwhelmingly” from Protestant backgrounds. The authors sought to identify items of the SISA that could be used to construct Religiously Pro, Neutral, and Anti “subscales.” Their intended goal was to reverse the normal scoring of religiously anti statements and then to join them with the religiously pro items so to produce a Religious Self-Actualization Scale. They discovered that none of the SISA items were perceived as antireligious; 2 were deter mined to be religiously neutral and 12 were rated as pro religious. Pro religious and Neutral Self-Actualization subscales were created from the original SISA items.

Practical Considerations:

This paper-and pencil measure has no special scoring and requires about l 0 minutes to complete.

Norms/Standardization:

There are no known published norms. The instrument was in tended to provide a short measure of self-actualization that could be used in research.

Reliability:

No reliability data were re ported by Watson et al. (1990). Jones and Crandall (1986) reported an internal consistency coefficient alpha of .65 and a test retest reliability over a 12-day period of .69.

Validity:

There are two aspects of validity relevant to the use of this instrument with religiously committed populations. The first has to do with the pro, anti, or neutral religious bias of the individual items. The authors’ research concluded that the SISA was “overwhelmingly defined as ‘proreligious”‘ and that the SISA may be a valuable tool in assessing the self-functioning of religious respondents.

The Proreligious and Neutral subscales demonstrated concurrent and discriminant validity when correlated with related mea sures of self functioning and with Intrinsic/Extrinsic religiosity. Both scales correlated significantly with self-esteem and self acceptance, but only the Proreligious sub scale correlated significantly with the Intrinsic scale.

Jones and Crandall (l 986) report a correlation of .69 with the full-scale POI and significant correlations with self-esteem (.41), a measure of rational behavior and beliefs (.44), and a measure of neuroticism (-.30). They also conducted a principle components analysis with varimax rotation of fac tors with eigenvalues greater than one. This resulted in five components, four of which were objectively interpretable (usinginde pendent judges): autonomy or self-direction, self-acceptance and self-esteem, acceptance of emotions and freedom of expression of emotions, and trust and responsibility in interpersonal relations. Crandall (1991) summarizes several studies using the SISA and concludes that the evidence for the validity of the SISA is “overwhelming.”