The development of the Revised Religious Life Inventory (RLI-R) by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis

Abstract

The Religious Life Inventory (RLI: Batson & Schoenrade, 1991) was designed to assess the extrinsic, intrinsic and quest orientations of religiosity and doubts have been expressed in the literature about its psychometric properties. An evaluation of the scale’s performance with a large sample of young adults of varying religious affiliations or none has shown that the instrument is not susceptible to confirmatory factor analysis. Several items that appear to have little discriminative ability and others that are ambiguous with respect to the orientations they are intended to represent have been identified. The structure suggested by an exploratory factor analysis has been subjected to sequential confirmatory factor analyses and a revised model has been developed which meets a variety of goodness of fit criteria and remains consistent with the original three-factor structure of the RLI. The Revised Religious Life Inventory, RLI-R, includes 24 of the original 32 items, and demonstrated improved scale reliability for the quest orientation and an unchanged reliability for the intrinsic orientation. A comparison of the original and revised instruments with respect to the frequency of church attendance and personal prayer, and religious affiliation suggests that the RLI-R is an improved instrument for future studies of religious orientation.