Internal reliability and temporal stability of the New Indices of Religious Orientation among Indian undergraduates: test–retest data over 15 days

Abstract

The present study examined the internal reliability and temporal stability of both the long and short forms of the New Indices of Religious Orientation, containing measures of Intrinsic, Extrinsic, and Quest religiosity, over a 15-day period among a sample of 100 Indian university students. Internal reliabilities for the long form of the measure at times 1 and 2 were acceptable for all subscales with the exception of the intrinsic subscale at time 2. Reliability estimates for the extrinsic and intrinsic subscales of the short form of the measure at both time 1 and time 2 were also less than satisfactory, though the alpha coefficients for the quest subscale were satisfactory. Data demonstrated that stability across the two administrations for both long- and short-form versions of the three dimensions of religious orientation were moderately high to high (ranging from r = 0.63 to r = 0.76). Moreover, intra-class correlation coefficients were similar to those derived from the Pearson's correlation coefficients, thus confirming that there were no systematic errors between the time 1 and time 2 datasets. However, there were significant differences in mean scores between time 1 and time 2 for both long- and short-form versions of the intrinsic and quest religious orientation subscales.