Construction of a religious identity status Questionnaire

Abstract

This study presents a construction and psychometric evaluation of the Religious Identity Status Questionnaire - RISQ for the assessment of the religious identity status according to Marcia's ego identity status approach. The initial item pool was generated based on Erikson's theory of psychosocial development, Marcia's ego identity status approach and interviews with adolescents and young adults. A factor analysis of the initial item pool was performed on data obtained from a sample of 394 secondary school and university students from Serbia to select items for the questionnaire. Validity of the questionnaire was examined on a sample of 1155 subjects. The results of the CFA suggest that subscales of the RISQ measure four factors corresponding to the identity statuses of Marcia's model. Correlations with ideological identity subscales of the EOM-EIS-2 suggest the convergent validity of the questionnaire. Configural measurement invariance was established for gender and denominational groups. Metric invariance was established for gender and among orthodox and catholic participants, whereas scalar invariance was established for gender, but not for denominational groups.