Centrality of Religiosity Scale in Polish Research: A Curvilinear Mechanism that Explains the Categories of Centrality of Religiosity

Beata Zarzycka,Radosław Rybarski,Rafał P Bartczuk

doi:10.3390/rel11020064

Beata Zarzycka, Radosław Rybarski + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11020064

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Abstract

The centrality of religiosity scale (CRS) is a measure of the importance of religious constructs in personality. The Polish CRS has been applied in more than 40 published studies on the psychology of religion, with over 18,000 total participants. However, no comprehensive overview on the Polish CRS is available. This paper shows how using the CRS sheds light on different patterns in which religion integrates with other psychological variables. It consists of three parts: first, we introduce the Polish adaptation of the CRS; second, we present the review of the research using the Polish CRS; and finally, we provide research results that suggest a curvilinear mechanism for explaining the categories of the centrality of religiosity. Three measures were applied to the research: the CRS, emotions toward God scale, and content of prayer scale-revised. The results indicated that there is a curvilinear relationship between centrality of religiosity and emotions toward God, prayer types, and styles of request prayer (excluding passive request prayer). We determined the changepoints at which the relationship between the centrality of religiosity and the religious contents changes. This finding allowed us to provide empirical confirmation of Huber’s thesis (2003) that there is a different way of operating low, medium, and high scores in centrality, namely marginal, subordinated, and central religiosity. The study also broadens our understanding of each of these types of religiosity.

Highlights

The centrality of religiosity scale (CRS) is a measure of the importance of the religious constructs in personality
The CRS is a part of the religiosity structure test (RST), a multidimensional tool to measure the importance and contents of the religious construct system in followers of theistic religions (Huber 2006)
The article consists of three parts: first, we introduce the Polish adaptation of the CRS; we present the review of research using the Polish CRS; we provide research in which we test the curvilinear relationship between centrality and the content of prayer, styles of religious coping, and emotions toward God

Summary

Introduction

The centrality of religiosity scale (CRS) is a measure of the importance of the religious constructs in personality. It has been developed by Stefan Huber and adapted into Polish by Beata. The CRS is a part of the religiosity structure test (RST), a multidimensional tool to measure the importance and contents of the religious construct system in followers of theistic religions (Huber 2006). The basic structure of the RST comprises five dimensions of religiosity distinguished by. The single five-dimensional scale, CRS, was developed to measure the importance of religiosity, whereas various measures of specific contents of religiosity were developed to measure them.

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