The Internal Consistency Reliability of the Santosh-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Hinduism among Bunts in South India

Empirical research in the social psychology of religion expanded considerably during the second half of the twentieth century, as clearly demonstrated by the developments charted in three editions of Michael Argyle's reviews of the field (Argyle, 1958; Argyle & Beit-Hallahmi, 1975; Beit-Hallahmi & Argyle, 1997). As yet, however, the empirical psychology of religion has remained largely shaped within the Christian tradition and, to a lesser extent, within the Jewish tradition. The important review of existing measures of religiosity published by Hill and Hood (1999) illustrated the paucity of measures appropriate for extending empirical studies in the psychology of religion to other faith traditions. The establishment of comparable empirical studies across different faith traditions would be facilitated by the development of comparable measures of religiosity. In a series of earlier studies Francis and his associates have argued that such comparability might best be achieved by concentration on the attitudinal dimension of religion. The argument was first developed within the Christian tradition on the grounds that indices of affiliation, belief and practice function somewhat differently among say, Catholics and Protestants. The argument was then extended across other faith traditions. The attitudinal dimension, on the other hand, functions in a similar way across faith traditions. On this account, attitudes are concerned with underlying predispositions of an affective nature. Scales concerned with attitude toward religion assess affective responses on a continuum anchored by positive and negative feelings. Francis' case was first introduced at the end of the 1970s in two papers in which he introduced the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity and invited colleagues to collaborate in building up a network of interrelated studies integrated through the application of a common measure (Francis, 1978a, 1978b). In the mid-1990s Kay and Francis (1996) reviewed over a hundred studies employing the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity and formulated emerging conclusions regarding the correlates, precursors and consequences of positive and negative attitude toward Christianity during childhood, adolescence and adulthood. The number of studies employing the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity has continued to grow and to enrich empirically-based knowledge about the function of religion in the context of social-psychological theory (Francis, 2009). Three attempts have been made to translate the concepts underpinning the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity in ways relevant to other faith traditions. The Sahin-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Islam was developed and tested among 381 Muslim adolescents attending sixth-form colleges in Birmingham in the United Kingdom (Sahin & Francis, 2002). The psychometric properties of this new scale were then confirmed among a sample of 1,199 Muslim students in Kuwait (Francis, Sahin, & Al-Ansari, 2006; Francis, Sahin, & Al-Failakawi, 2008). The Katz-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Judaism was developed among 618 Hebrew-speaking Jewish students in Israel (Francis & Katz, 2007) and then tested among separate samples of 298 female Jewish students (Francis & Katz, 2002) and 203 male Jewish students (Francis, Katz, Yablon, & Robbin, 2004), also in Israel. The most recent addition to this series, the Santosh-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Hinduism was developed and tested among 330 Hindu young people, between the ages of 12 and 35, attending the Hindu Youth Festival 2001 in London (Francis, Santosh, Robbins, & Vij, 2008). According to this study, the internal consistency reliability of the scale was demonstrated by an alpha coefficient of . 89, while the proportion of variance accounted for by the first factor was established as 33%. It cannot be assumed, however, that a measure of attitude toward Hinduism developed among Hindu young people in the United Kingdom will necessarily transfer to nations at the heart of the Hindu faith. …