Faith

There is no validated instrument behind this one and none is wanted. Religiosity research supplied a map of the subject area and nothing else: Glock's five dimensions of 1962 (belief, practice, experience, knowledge, consequences), Davie's observation in 1994 that believing and belonging come apart, and Huber and Huber's centrality construct of 2012 are why these twelve blocks are grouped into what is held, what is practised, where it came from and what it touches. The Centrality of Religiosity Scale, the Duke University Religion Index, Allport and Ross's Religious Orientation Scale, the Religious Commitment Inventory-10, the Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire and the Fetzer/NIA measure were all read; none of their items appear here. Reading them is also why two questions an earlier draft carried are not here. An attendance-frequency ladder is the shape of DUREL's first item and of the CRS public-practice item, so this instrument asks where you belong instead of how often you go. A "what settles right and wrong" item is the shape of a Pew question, and it duplicated the grounds vocabulary that already runs under every block, so it was cut rather than reworded. Nothing is scored. There is no devoutness figure and no orthodoxy figure, and there is no reliability coefficient or factor structure either, because a position you state has none and needs none — you are not being placed against a sample, you are writing down what you hold and what you think it rests on. Every block that assumes a belief carries an option declining the assumption, so the form runs straight through for someone who holds a faith firmly, for someone who has left one and for someone who never had one, and none of those three is treated as the incomplete answer. No block asks about anyone but you: there is no question here that a person answering alone has to invent a partner in order to reach.

Further reading

• Glock, C. Y. (1962). On the study of religious commitment (opens in a new tab). Religious Education, 57(sup4), 98–110original source
• Davie, G. (1994). Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without belonging (opens in a new tab). Blackwell, Oxford (Making Contemporary Britain series)original source
• Huber, S., & Huber, O. W. (2012). The Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS) (opens in a new tab). Religions, 3(3), 710–724original source
• Voas, D., & Crockett, A. (2005). Religion in Britain: Neither believing nor belonging (opens in a new tab). Sociology, 39(1), 11–28critique

Read the result as a structured version of what you said, not as a measurement of you.