Measuring Religiosity in Later Life

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to devise and test a multidimensional measurement model of late life religiosity that is composed of three major components: organizational religiosity, subjective religiosity, and religious beliefs. The religious belief dimension, which has been overlooked frequently in prior research, is assessed in part with items that ask about belief in the Ten Commandments. Alternative ways of specifying the relationships among these dimensions are explored, including first- and second-order factor models. The findings that are derived from estimating these confirmatory factor models are supplemented with additional analyses that examine the differential impact of the religiosity factors on an external criterion measure (i.e., life satisfaction). Throughout, the goal is to provide investigators with a practical approach to evaluating the utility of complex multidimensional factor models of religiosity.