Measuring Religiousness in Health Research: Review and Critique

Although existing measures of religiousness are sophisticated, no single approach has yet emerged as a standard. We review the measures of religiousness most commonly used in the religion and health literature with particular attention to their limitations, suggesting that vigilance is required to avoid over-generalization. After placing the development of these scales in historical context, we discuss measures of religious attendance, private religious practice, and intrinsic/extrinsic religious motivation. We also discuss measures of religious coping, wellbeing, belief, affiliation, maturity, history, and experience. We also address the current trend in favor of multi-dimensional and functional measures of religiousness. We conclude with a critique of the standard, “context-free” approach aimed at measuring “religiousness-in-general”, suggesting that future work might more fruitfully focus on developing ways to measure religiousness in specific, theologically relevant contexts.

Relationships between early and final reports of treatment outcome in long-term group psychotherapy

A study of the report of treatment outcome in three long-term therapy groups focused on two questions: 1) Are early reports of treatment outcome significantly related to final reports, i.e., is there substantial consistency in outcome reports over the course of therapy? 2) Are final reports of treatment outcome significantly more favorable than early reports, i.e., do patients experience significant improvement after the early part of therapy? Affirmative answers to these two questions for a number of outcome variables led to a consideration of a number of clinical and research implications.     

Anatomic and environmental dimensions of stimulus-response compatibility: implication for theories of memory coding.

Reaction time was higher when the relation between stimulus location and anatomic hand was reversed (e.g., left light-right hand) rather than direct (e.g., left light-left hand), even though the environmental location of the hand (up or down) was unrelated to the location of the stimulus (left or right). This effect was shown to be due primarily to decision processes, rather than to interhemisphere transfer delay. This result does not support the view that long-term memory for responses encodes environmental but not anatomic dimensions.     

The role of social cognition in early trust

Language serves as a means of learning from other people. However, communication systems allow the truth to be disguised, whether out of ignorance, fear, deviousness or mistaken judgment. Recent research has explored the extent to which young children are selective in whom they trust for information and the mechanisms that support such selectivity.     

A study of religion, ministry, and meaning in caregiving among health professionals in an institutional setting in New York City

The clinical staff of a large metropolitan nursing home was surveyed about their religious practices, the degree to which they saw their work as a ministry, and the meaning they obtain from being caregivers. Age, race, gender, education, and various other measures were also taken. As hypothesized, religiosity made a significant positive contribution to participants' belief their work was a ministry to those in need. Multiple regression revealed that African American and older staff scored significantly higher on both dependent variables, whereas Caucasians were significantly less likely to view their work as ministry. Staff who worked with long-term patients derived significantly more meaning from their work, but they were no more likely to see it as ministry. Religiosity appears to enhance the meaning caregivers get from their work, and this may be beneficial to patients. Further research may identify other factors that enhance the meaning caregivers get from their work.     

Validation of the Duke Religion Index: DUREL (Portuguese Version)

The purpose of the current study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Portuguese version of the Duke Religion Index (PDUREL) in a community setting. PDUREL was translated and adapted for administration to 383 individuals from a population-based study of low-income community-dwelling adults. The PDUREL intrinsic subscale and total scores demonstrated high internal consistency (alphas ranging from 0.733 for the total scale score to 0.758 for the intrinsic subscale). Correlations among the DUREL subscales were also examined for evidence of discriminant validity. Correlations were ranging from 0.36 to 0.46, indicating significant overlap between the scales without marked redundancy. PDUREL is a reliable and valid scale. The availability of a comprehensive, but brief measure of religiousness can help to study the role of religiousness in health by researchers from countries that speak the Portuguese language.     

Influence of multiple-day temporal distribution of repetitions on memory: a comparison of uniform, expanding, and contracting schedules

Very few studies have examined the influence of schedules of repetitions across multiple days (e.g., Tsai, 1927 ). Three temporal schedules of four presentations of pseudoword/word pairs over a 7-day learning period were compared: a uniform (presentations on Days 1, 3, 5, and 7), an expanding (1, 2, 3, 7), and a contracting (1, 5, 6, 7) schedule. Schedule was a within-subjects variable. Experiment 1 was performed on the Internet and showed that cued recall on Day 9 led to higher scores for the stimuli of the expanding schedule. Experiment 2 was performed in the laboratory and showed that the expanding and the uniform schedules led to the highest scores on Day 9. A recognition task performed during the learning phase revealed that stimuli recognized at the time of their repetition were more likely to be retrieved later than the others. Our results are discussed within the framework of the study-phase retrieval and encoding variability theories.