Authors: Samantha Denbow, Katie Finlinson, Carley Grube, Joseph Johnson, Tanner Dougherty
Mentors: Kirsten L Graham
Insitution: Southern Utah University
Religious affiliation is rapidly declining (Engelman, 2019). Given that religions often perpetuate an in-group out-group dynamic, bidirectional prejudices can be seen between both people who are a part of and people who are not a part of religion (Jackson & Hunsberger, 1999). One explanation for this phenomena of leaving religion and increased prejudice is that there is a shift in attitudes towards religion. Attitudes affect behavior and may explain why people are leaving religion and becoming more prejudiced towards religious and non-religious groups. Our scale Attitudes Towards Religion (ATR) aims to measure attitudes towards religion to better understand why these cultural shifts are happening. We have defined attitudes as “a mostly enduring organization of thoughts, feelings, and behavioral tendencies directed towards objects, groups, events, or symbols” (Breckler, 1984; Hogg & Vaughan, 2005). Little research has been done to determine attitudes as a three part model (affect, cognition, and behavior) when examining religion. The current measures used to examine attitudes towards religion are less defined and fail to address the tripartite model of attitudes by relying more on affective and cognitive components of attitudes (Breckler, 1984). One such scale is called the Astley–Francis Scale of Attitude Towards Theistic Faith, which measures attitudes through affective items on a Likert scale. As demonstrated through this scale and others, many measures are also limited to attitudes of theistic, western religions, rather than encompassing nontheistic religions (Astley et al., 2012; Szydłowski et al., 2021). Attitudes are important to research because they impact daily choices in every individual’s life. Our study sample will be recruited through the Amazon Mechanical Turk survey platform and researchers’ social media pages. We predict our scale will measure attitudes towards religion to further inform current literature concerning religion and religious exit. We will examine reliability in our scale by testing Cronbach's alpha to ensure internal consistency. A small pilot group of 5 undergraduate peers reviewed the items for clarity, readability, and face validity. We then made changes to the items based on the feedback. Because our measure was developed according to a well-established tripart theory of attitude, a confirmatory factor analysis will be used to assess initial factor structure and how well our model fits the data. In addition, we will examine convergent validity by comparing the Astley–Francis Scale of Attitude Towards Theistic Faith with our scale. Discriminant validity will be examined by comparing other non-related scales that measure different constructs with our scale. With this information, further research can be done to understand the correlation between attitudes towards religion and religious participation/exit.
The authors for this project are Samantha Denbow, Katie Finlinson, Joseph Johnson, Tanner Dougherty, and Carley Grube. This information will be presented in a poster format.