Afterlife Motivation Scale: Correlations With Maladjustment and Incremental Validity in Iranian Muslims

Abstract

In a previous study of Iranian Muslims, two scales measuring religious commitments based on a desire to avoid hell and to reach heaven predicted maladjustment. The responding of Iranian university students in this investigation revealed that these two forms of desire could be reduced to a single factor that was adequately operationalized in a brief six-item instrument. This Afterlife Motivation Scale displayed strong internal consistency and correlated positively with the extrinsic personal, extrinsic social, and intrinsic religious orientations and with nearness to God, depression, anxiety, and death anxiety. Multiple regression analyses indicated that this scale recorded a specific form of religious psychological functioning that could not be reduced to more general intrinsic and extrinsic forms of religiousness. This brief instrument could be useful in future efforts to better understand one way in which heaven and hell might be meaningful for Iranian and perhaps other Muslims and for followers of other religious traditions.