Report of the Measures Library Project

Greetings. The goal of the Measures Library Project is to create a library of faith measures – scales, interview protocols and other measures of religiousness, spirituality, faith, the sacred, prayer, forgiveness and related constructs. We are not an official task force or committee, but we are a project that was commissioned by Doug Oman in 2016 as one of his presidential initiatives. There is currently no repository or library of faith measures, apart from 125 measures appearing in Peter Hill and Ralph Hood’s (1999) text, Measures of Religiosity, disjointed lists in Mental Measurements Yearbook and Tests in Print and a few (mostly sociological) measures in The Association of Religion Data Archives (The ARDA). Doug reasoned that SPRS should create such a library.

We are collecting faith measures themselves as well as articles that present psychometric information on them, in cooperation with a grant-funded research project being conducted by Peter Hill, Ralph Hood, Jonathan Jong and Kevin Harris. A three-year, $1.65 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation was given to two sociologists, Roger Finke and Chris Bader, to develop the Association for Religion Data Archives, a repository of archival data on religious measures. Three hundred thousand dollars of this grant was allocated to Peter Hill, Ralph Hood, Jonathan Jong and Kevin Harris, and teams of graduate student research assistants at Biola University, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the University of Texas of the Permian Basin and Our Lady of the Lake University have been gathering measures and writing psychometric reviews – reviews that will form the chapters of the second edition of Measures of Religiosity. We are working on reviews of over 800 scales. The ARDA is interested in putting these scales and their reviews on their website. As part of my work, I have been gathering together scales and their psychometric articles, since I have easy access to many of them as a part of this grant-funded research project.

Since Doug Oman proposed this project three years ago, SPRS should have a stake in this measures library. We can share information with The ARDA, but as psychological measures differ in important ways from sociological measures, psychologists of religion and spirituality should be involved in the creation and maintenance of this library.

Sincerely,

Kevin A. Harris, PhD, LP, HSP
SPRS Measures Library Task Force, 2019

Author Bio

Kevin Harris is an assistant professor of counseling psychology at Our Lady of the Lake University.