Centrality of Religiosity Scale in the Swiss Household Panel – statistical exploration of the multidimensional measurement model.
Conférence de Michael ACKERT, PhD, Institute for Empirical Research on Religions, Univ. Bern
Mardi 28 novembre 2023
16:15 - 18:00
En présentiel : Salle 5033
A distance par Zoom
Dans le cadre du Colloque de recherche ISSR "Enquêter en sciences sociales des religions : psychologie de la religion, sociologie des religions, sciences sociales des migrations"
Abstract for the talk :
Measurement is fundamental in science, including the investigations in social scientific fields. Objective, valid, and reliable measurement tools are the cornerstone of such scientific enquiry. Throughout the 20th century, scholarly pursuits within the domains of religion and spirituality have been characterized by an intensive quest for the development of robust and encompassing instruments for the evaluation of relevant constructs. Among the varied motivations underpinning this search was the ambition to establish a broad-based metric for assessing general religiosity. In this context, 2003 marked the introduction of the Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS), a novel scale created to facilitate a holistic and integrative approach to the empirical quantification of religiosity through self-reporting.
Post-2012, the Swiss Household Panel (SHP) has incorporated the CRSi-7, a condensed inter-religious adaptation of the CRS, into its religion and spirituality module, acquiring a dataset of 3,522 participants over the years 2012, 2015, 2018, and 2021. Guided by the investigative objective to evaluate the CRS's reliability and stability as an instrument for religiosity assessment, a laborious empirical analysis of the SHP dataset is undertaken. This analysis prioritizes the assessment of the scale's internal consistency, along with the verification of its configural, metric, and scalar invariance through multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. An additional focal point is the temporal invariance of the scale.
The results are critically examined with respect to their implications for measurement methodologies and the significance they hold for the longitudinal monitoring of religiosity in Switzerland, employing a multidimensional framework for the conceptualization of religiosity.
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