Religious beliefs and self-disclosure.

Summary.-The relationship between religious beliefs and scores on Jourard's self-disclosure scale was investigated (N = 83). The correlation between beliefs and self-disclosure was zero-order. Ss did perceive themselves to be significantly more "liberal" in religious beliefs than they felt their parents would expect. Over the past two decades studies of 'religion' have measured such varied things as religious affiliation, social affiliation, religious practices, and religious beliefs. It has been too often concluded that, since certain religious groups demonstrated characteristics such as dogmatism or authoritarianism, these qualities must be direct functions of the content of their religious belief (cf. Gregory, 1957; Rokeach, 1960; Brown & Lowe, 1951). However, as Feagin (1964) and Gilmore (1969) demonstrate, even in religious groups with homogeneous theological positions there is a great deal of heterogeneity on such variables as dogmatism and prejudice. Thus, the evidence is equivocal that religious beliefs taken in and of themselves are necessarily associated with specific personality dimensions. This paper briefly reports the author's first attempt to investigate empirically the relationship between the religious beliefs an individual explicitly affirms and a selfreport measure of his behavior, the extent to which he reports himself to be 'open', 'selfdisclosing' or 'known' by significant others. It was hypothesized that persons who perceive themselves as more liberal in explicitly affirmed theological stance will also perceive themselves as more 'open' and 'self-disclosing' to significant others than will persons who see themselves as theologically conservative. Further, it was hypothesized that persons from a college population will perceive themselves as more liberal in religious belief than they feel their parents would expect. Method.-Two self-report questionnaires1 were administered to 83 Ss, all undergraduate students in a southwestern university. The theological questionnaire was a 35item instrument designed by the writer for this study and having unknown reliability and validity. It included 29 items in question form focused around religious beliefs, and 6 items which reflected intensity of religious commitment. Responses were scored on a 3-point scale so that a high score was designed to reflect a conservative theological position and a low score presumably reflected a liberal stance. The possible range of scores was from 35 to 87. It should be noted here that no interpretations were made regarding whether a person was 'religious' or 'non-religious', but only whether his explicitly affirmed beliefs were 'conservative' or 'liberal'. Ss responded to the questionnaire twice; first, "as your parents would expect you to respond," and second, "as honestly as possible with regard to your own beliefs." All responses were anonymous. From the two instructional sets and two scales, four scores were derived: (A) Parentally expected religious beliefs; (B) Parentally expected religious commitment, (C) Self-chosen religious beliefs, (D) Self-chosen religious commitment. The psychological measure was Jourard's (1964) "Self-disclosure Questionnaire," a GO-item questionnaire dealing with a person's attitudes toward work, tastes, money, per'The questionnaire and supplementary data may be obtained as Document NAPS-01245 from ASIS National Auxiliary Publications Service, c/o CCM Information Corp., 909 Third Ave., 21st Floor, New York, N. Y. 10022. Remit $2.00 for microfiche or $7.30 for photocopy.