Takahashi and Remus (2023). Japanese Journal for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 1(1), 33–40.

The organization of psychological assessment instruments forreligiosity and spirituality 1, 2
－Relevant subject headings in the APA PsycTests database－
Masami TAKAHASHI (Northeastern Illinois University)and Edward REMUS (Northeastern Illinois University)

Although the number of studies related to the psychology of religion and spirituality has increased
dramatically around the world since the late 20th century, there appears to be less enthusiasm forthis sub-field among Japanese empirical researchers. One possible reason is the lack of a relatively
comprehensive yet convenient Japanese-language research database that can be used to retrieve
psychological assessment instruments; such a database is essential to the initial phase of empiricalinvestigation. Here, we introduce four distinct English-language databases relevant topsychological testing and measurement with a particular focus on APA PsycTests, one of thelargest and most readily available databases in the U.S. for identifying psychological assessment
instruments relevant to the study of religion and spirituality. Although it is a complex database, it
is relatively manageable even for non-English-speaking users. By consulting the subject index
within APA PsycTests, we created a list of American Psychological Association (APA) “subject
headings” related to religion and spirituality that, taken together, yield a total of 1,444 tests within
APA PsycTests. We categorized these subject headings according to six meaningful topic areas:
General, Beliefs and Denominations, Organizational, Practical/Experiential, Conceptual, andTherapeutic. Instead of the hit-and-miss approach that many scholars often employ when using
existing Japanese-language databases, this list of subject headings provides researchers with aclear and comprehensive overview of the topics covered by tests and measurements in the fieldof the psychology of religion and spirituality.

Religion and spirituality constitute an importantnumber of journal articles retrieved by searching for
cultural fabric of our society, and theologians andthe keywords “religion” or “spirituality” in the APA
other scholars have been exploring the written and
PsycInfo database, published up to 1990, is only
spoken words of various religious doctrines for
10,054, whereas the number of articles publishedmillennia. However, it was not until the late 20thsince 1991 quadrupled to 45,188.
century that psychologists and other social scientists
In Japan, empirical efforts to examine thebegan consistently investigating religion andpsychology of religion and spirituality have likewise
spirituality using empirical methods (Ribaudo &increased substantially over the last few decades;
Takahashi, 2009). Although some empirical efforts
however, compared to the U.S. and Europe, the field
were made earlier (e.g., Allport, 1950), the fieldremains in its infancy when judged in terms of thebegan gaining traction particularly after 1991 when
number of publications, empirical researchers, viable
the World Health Organization (WHO) identified
presentation outlets, and professional organizations
spirituality to be an important component in(Takahashi & Kato, in press). There are various
determining Quality of Life (QOL). In fact, thereasons for this shortcoming. For example, there is————
1 The authors wish to thank Professor Lisa Wallis, Associate Dean of Libraries and eResources and Systems
Librarian at Northeastern Illinois University, for the valuable guidance she provided in the course of thisresearch.
2 Corresponding author: Masami TAKAHASHI (E-mail: m-takahashi[at]neiu.edu)

Takahashi and Remus (2023). Japanese Journal for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 1(1), 33–40.

generally a negative view of religion/spirituality
among laypeople in Japan, due largely to the historyof the Japanese government using religion as apropaganda tool (Rohlen, 1978; Takahashi, 2016).
Sensational crimes committed by religious cults havecontributed to this unfavorable research climate as
well. In the social sciences, many researchers still
perceive religion/spirituality to be too metaphysical a
construct of empirical research. As such, there is little
ongoing effort to create a consensus on the basic
definitions of the key constructs. In addition, thefederal government recently implemented a new
curriculum for the college education that took
resources away from non-STEM fields including
psychology and religion/spirituality. This seems tohave exacerbated the decline not only in funding but
also in enthusiasm for empirical research.
On a more practical level, psychologicalresearchers in Japan may be reluctant to study
religion and spirituality due to the lack of aconvenient and comprehensive database of
assessment instruments. While all manuscripts
published domestically are stored in the National
Diet Library databases (CiNii Books and CiNii
Articles), there is no database specific to psychology
or religion/spirituality. For example, a simple
keyword search for religion (宗教) produces 148,718
results in CiNii Articles, but there are no efficient
functions in these databases to distinguish empiricalstudies from other types of manuscripts such asmagazine essays, newspaper articles, politicalcommentaries, etc.
The Japanese language’s unique linguistic
characteristics further complicate the use of Japanese
in a database search. Like other Asian languages,
including Chinese and Korean, the Japanese
language traditionally uses unpunctuated/un-spaced
text, and the meaning of a word (or part of a word) isoften inferred from the context (Prasoon, 2015). For
example, when keyword searching for studies
involving religious “cult” (カルト), all papers(empirical or otherwise) involving Imunocult (イムノカルト), a type of colorectal cancer screening
method,aredisplayed.
Similarly,
when“ religion/religious ” ( 宗 教 ) is searched as a
keyword, the search results include all publications

that contain religion/religious anywhere within theirbibliographic information (e.g., “ Department ofReligion” listed within the author’s AffiliatedInstitution, “religious newspapers” listed in
Publication Outlet, etc.). In addition, it is extremely
difficult, if not impossible, to narrow the search tothose publications introducing new measurement
tools.
Although religion- and spirituality-related
constructs in Japanese and English are not always
convertible, Japanese researchers are likely to benefit
from using databases in English not only because
these databases are more user-friendly but also
because they may reveal novel concepts not yet wellknown in Japan. A case in point is the concept ofspirituality, which was not examined empirically inJapan prior to 2002 (see 高橋・井出， 2004). Suchdatabases often prove too challenging for students
and novice researchers in Japan to use, however.
At present, there are four major English-language
databases that can be used to access information
about psychological tests and measures. While thesefour databases often overlap in terms of theinformation they provide, they are neverthelessunique in their coverage, and none can be substituted
for another. Health and Psychosocial Instruments(HaPI) provides information about behavioral tests(both psychological and non-psychological) that are
relevant to the health sciences. Mental Measurements
Yearbook with Tests in Print (MMY-TIP) provides
information about and reviews of selected Englishlanguage, commercially available tests. APA
PsycInfo, produced by the American Psychological
Association (APA), is the most comprehensive
database of scholarly journal articles in the field of
psychology, and finally, APA PsycTest3 is an index
and repository (when full-text tests are available) of
psychological tests developed for research.
Of these four databases, APA PsycTests is the one
most relevant to researchers seeking to identify thefullest range of psychological tests of religion andspirituality, as it provides bibliographic information
on a significantly greater number of tests in thissubfield compared to both HaPI and MMY-TIP. APA
PsycInfo does not provide bibliographic information
about assessment instruments; however, it can be- 34 -

Takahashi and Remus (2023). Japanese Journal for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 1(1), 33–40.

utilized very productively in tandem with APA
PsycTests, as discussed below.
The objective of this paper is to provide
researchers with a comprehensive list of subject
headings that can be utilized in the APA PsycTests
database to identify psychological instruments
relevant to the study of religion and spirituality.
“Subject headings” refer to the controlled vocabularyof terms generated and maintained by the APA’s
Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms for use inorganizing bibliographic records by topic within APA
databases. Subject headings describe the core topicalcontent of a database record, and they tend tocorrespond to distinct areas or objects of inquiry
within a given academic discipline. The list of subject
headings provided here will help researchers who
may otherwise inadvertently miss relevant topics
when using the APA PsycTests database. Further,such a list is particularly valuable in Japan as anaccumulation of empirical findings in the field of
religion and spirituality is urgently needed.
Known as “subject searching,” searching within
the subject field of a database for resultscorresponding to one or more specific subject
headings offers a number of advantages compared toordinary keyword searching. Keyword searching isuseful to novice researchers who wish to find search
results matching whichever words they believe will
best describe their research topic. Keyword searching
may also prove useful to researchers investigating
very new or cutting-edge topics to which subject
headings have yet to be applied. However, a keyword
search is limited to the user’s existing knowledge of
relevant vocabulary in their field of research, and thisknowledge may fail to correspond to the terminologythat is actually used in the field of research. For
example, a database user researching the consecrated
personnel of religious organizations may be aware of
the need to search for terms such as “priests” and“rabbis” but may be unfamiliar with terms such as“clergy” or “ministers.” Therefore, any given
keyword search is likely to generate at least someirrelevant results (i.e. “false hits”) and/or incomplete
results (i.e. “misses”). This potential for user error issignificantly reduced if the user instead searches forresults corresponding to one or more subject

headings related to their topic. Because the list of
subject headings used in a given database ispredetermined, and because these subject headingsalign very closely with the core topical content of thedatabase’s records, a researcher who is familiar withthe relevant subject headings in their field canconstruct subject searches which return relevant
results alongside very few false hits or misses. The
researcher’s lack of familiarity with the specificsubject headings relevant to their research topic
within a given database is the chief obstacle standing
in the way of this outcome.

MethodAPA
PsycTests
providesbibliographic
information about more than 32,000 psychologicaltests and assessment instruments. Many tests indexedin APA PsycTests are shortened, back-translated,
and/or population-specific versions of an original test,
and these modified versions are typically available
full-text. Subject indexing is robust in APA PsycTests;
tests are typically indexed under multiple subject
headings.
For instance, in Figure 1, a researcher has selected“Advanced Search” and has chosen to search withinthe “DE Subjects [Exact]” field for two subject
terms: Buddhism or Buddhists. The user has
separated these terms by the word “or” whichfunctions as a Boolean operator in the database; inthis example, the “or” operator instructs the databaseto retrieve results matching either the subject term
Buddhism or the subject term Buddhists (or bothsubject terms, when applicable). This search would
be useful to a researcher seeking instruments thatmeasure either Buddhism as a religion or Buddhists
as practitioners of that religion.
In Figure 2, the researcher has added a third
subject term, “religious buildings,” to the searchdemonstrated in Figure 1. The user has separated thisthird term from the first two terms by the word “AND”
which functions as a Boolean operator in the
database; in this example, the “and” operator
instructs the database to retrieve only those results
which match the third subject term, “religious
buildings,” in addition to one or both of the first two
subject terms (i.e., Buddhism or Buddhists). This

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Takahashi and Remus (2023). Japanese Journal for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 1(1), 33–40.

Figure 1 A One-Line Search for DE Subject Terms in the APA PsycTests Database

Figure 2 A Two-Line Search for DE Subject Terms in the APA PsycTests Databasesearch would be useful to a researcher seeking
instruments that measure religious buildings specificto Buddhism or to practitioners of Buddhism.
In this project, we reviewed the entire contents of
the alphabetically-arranged subject index in APA
PsycTests in order to generate an exhaustive list of“Exact (DE)” subject headings related to religion andspirituality that generate search results. In order toensure the comprehensiveness of the subject
headings provided within this list, we reviewed eachand every term listed in the index (from A to Z).
Some of the terms listed in the subject index required
deliberation among the authors as to whether or notthey are directly relevant to the study of religion andspirituality. For example, the authors decided toinclude the term “mysticism” but decided to exclude
the term “asceticism” because the latter is regarded
more as a lifestyle than as a form of religion or
spirituality per se. Figure 3 illustrates a particularly
fertile page of the index with respect to the field of- 36 -

Takahashi and Remus (2023). Japanese Journal for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 1(1), 33–40.

Figure 3 Browsing the DE Subject Terms Index in the APA PsycTests Databasereligion and spirituality, a page beginning with“religion” and proceeding to “religion andspirituality measures,” “religiosity,” and so on. The
index lists the number of database records
corresponding to each term.
It should be noted that we did not review “Authorsupplied keywords,” those terms volunteered by the
researchers who produced the tests indexed in the
database. A more General (“SU”) subject search will
generate results matching these author-supplied
keywords. Because author-supplied keywords do notcomprise a controlled vocabulary, however, they are
greater in number and less exact when compared to“Exact (DE)” subject headings.

Results and Discussion
Table 1 offers an exhaustive list of subject
headings related to religion and spirituality thatgenerate at least one search result in the APA
PsycTests database as of November 2022. The
number of tests available corresponding to eachsubject heading is also provided. A search for all tests
indexed under one or more of the subject headings
listed in Table 1 yields 1,444 instruments, 642 ofwhich are available in the database full-text. The
search result numbers listed next to each subject
heading in Table 1 amount to well over 2,600 when

added together because many individual instruments
have multiple subject headings applied to themwithin the database.
The subject headings listed in Table 1 are divided
into six broad categories that were generated by theauthors: “General” (subject headings simply
referring to religion, spirituality, and faith), “Beliefs
and Denominations” (subject headings including
religious disciplines, denominations, or belief
systems), “Organizational (subject headings
referring to organizations and personnel),“Practical/Experiential” (subject headings referring
to religious/spiritual experiences and practices),“Conceptual” (subject headings involving religious
concepts), and “Therapeutic” (subject headings
referring to therapeutic interventions).
Judged by the total number of search results
yielded by all of the subject headings listed within the
category, “General” is the largest of the six categories
while “Therapeutic” is the smallest of the six
categories. There are a number of interesting findings
here. For one, while the concept of “Spirituality” wasrarely mentioned in the empirical literature prior to
the 1980s (Ribaudo & Takahashi, 2009), it is now
associated with psychological instruments more thaneither “Religion” or “Religiosity.” Second,
understandably, there are twice as many instruments- 37 -

Takahashi and Remus (2023). Japanese Journal for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 1(1), 33–40.

Table 1
Subject headings relevant to religion and spirituality in APA PsycTests (number of results generated for eachsubject term).
General（全般）
Spirituality (461)
Religiosity (323)
Religion (139)
Faith (54)Religion and spirituality measures (34)

Beliefs and Denominations（信念・信仰・教派）
Muslims (129)
Jews (66)Islam (61)
Christians (51)
Christianity (49)
Buddhism (27)
Religious fundamentalism (25)Mysticism (23)Catholics (22)
Confucianism (16)Atheism (14)Buddhists (12)Roman Catholicism (12)Protestants (11)Hindus (8)Muslim Americans (8)Judaism (7)Bible (6)Mormons (5)Agnosticism (4)Hinduism (4)Protestantism (4)Sikhs (3)
Sikhism (2)Cultism (1)Organizational（教団など）
Religious groups (37)
Religious buildings (20)Clergy (19)
Religious organizations (11)Religious education (8)Religious personnel (8)Faith based organizations (6)Ministers (religion) (6)Priests (6)Missionaries (2)Religious communities (2)Religious literature (2)Rabbis (1)Practical/Experiential（実践・経験的）
Religious practices (148)
Spiritual well being (45)
Prayer (38)
Religious experiences (34)
Religious conversion (3)Confession (Religion) (1)Interfaith marriage (1)Conceptual（概念）
Religious beliefs (449)
God concepts (146)
Religious affiliation (40)
Religious prejudices (21)Sin (6)
Theology (4)Therapeutic（療法的）Spiritual care (31)Faith healing (7)Pastoral counseling (6)- 38 -

Takahashi and Remus (2023). Japanese Journal for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 1(1), 33–40.

measuring “religiosity,” a psychological quality of
being religious, than “religion” itself.
Judged by the number of subject headings listed
within the category, the “Beliefs and Denominations”
category is the largest as there are many religious
denominations/traditions around the world. Further,
the “Therapeutic” category is again the smallest of
the six categories.
Test constructs are also indexed in APA PsycTests.
While the database does not allow the user to refine
their search results by construct, users can browse thedatabase’s construct index (which operates similarly
to the subject index) for constructs related to religion
and spirituality and the measurement instruments
which deploy them; many constructs, such as“abandonment by God” and “religious and spiritualfunctioning,” are not available as subject headings.
Many of these constructs are used by only a single
test while others are utilized by multiple tests.
Researchers seeking evaluative or secondary
literature about one or more psychologicalassessment instruments used within the sub-field of
religion and spirituality are encouraged to utilize the
APA PsycInfo database in tandem with APA PsycTests.
The former is a considerably larger database than thelatter, containing over five million bibliographic
records. APA PsycInfo chiefly indexes academic
journal articles, scholarly books, and dissertations.
Like APA PsycTests, APA PsycInfo offers a browsable
construct index but does not allow users to refine
search results by test construct. However, subject
indexing is thorough in APA PsycInfo. For example,
a search in APA PsycInfo for peer-reviewed articles
indexed under one or more of the subject headings
listed in Table 1 yields approximately 56,000 results.
The same search also yields results bearing a numberof religion- and spirituality-related subject headings
which yield no search results in APA PsycTests, suchas “shamanism.” This means that while researchers
can retrieve no instruments (to date) designed to
study the topic of shamanism in PsycTests,
researchers can nevertheless retrieve articles
studying the topic of shamanism in PsycInfo.
Researchers should note that APA PsycInfo offers asmall number of subject headings specifically related
to psychological testing and measurement, including“psychometrics,” “test construction,” “test validity,”and “test reliability.” Researchers can pair one ormore of these testing-related subject headings with
one or more of the religion-related subject headings
listed in Table 1 to locate the English-language
scholarly literature addressing psychological testing
and assessment within the sub-field of religion andspirituality specifically.

Summary
The number of empirical studies related to thepsychology of religion and spirituality is on the rise.
However, this trend is less marked in Japan forvarious reasons including a lack of readily available
databases for psychological tests and measurement
instruments. In this report, we first identified anumber of English-language databases that empiricalresearchers can use to identify psychologicalinstruments relevant to the study of religion andspirituality. In particular, we focused on APA
PsycTests, one of the most readily available andmanageable databases in the U.S. at present. Whileits structure is complex and thus difficult to maneuver,
the subject headings available in the database makeit relatively easy even for a novice and non-Englishspeaking scholars to produce relevant search results.
As Japanese databases, particularly in the field of
psychological research, are limited in their scope,function, and convenience, some of the techniquespresented here for the use of APA PsycTests should
encourage Japanese scholars to engage in empiricalresearch. Finally, it must be mentioned that morecollaboration between empirical researchers andlibrarian scientists is highly recommended to
improve the existing Japanese databases so thatmeaningful literature searches are carried out withrelative ease.

Notes
3 APA PsycTests is accessible via the American
Psychological Association website (APA.org).
Registration instructions for both individual andinstitutional licenses can be found athttps://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/PsycTests/.

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Takahashi and Remus (2023). Japanese Journal for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 1(1), 33–40.

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