Measuring Interfaith Spirituality: Cross-Cultural Validation of Interfaith Spirituality Scale and Its Short Version

Abstract

A recent study proposed the concept of interfaith spirituality (IFS) that included direct relation with the creator, asceticism, unity of existence, meditation, and divine love, and introduced a measure for it based on an Egyptian sample. The current study utilized five data sets (Egyptians (N = 490), Turkish (N = 420), Kuwaitis (N = 300), Syrians/Palestinians (N = 179), and the UK (N = 177)) participants in a combined multi-national sample (N = 1566) to test the invariance of the found unitary second-order factor with four first-order factors of interfaith spirituality across nationalities, religious groups, and gender. The goal also was to test its psychometrics in the new multi-national sample. Confirmatory factor analysis provided evidence for the proposed structure found in the previous study. Multigroup analyses provided evidence of the strong to strict invariance of the IFS structure across national groups, religious groups (Christians and Muslims), and genders. The measure had a high alpha reliability of .97. The 4 items short form of the scale had an alpha of .83. It had good convergent and divergent and predictive validity. It was correlated with religiosity, posttraumatic growth, identity salience, and emotion regulation. It was negatively correlated with internalizing, externalizing, and thought disorders as well as with poor physical health. Further, using step-wise regression analysis, the measure proved to have strong incremental validity, as IFS contributed the highest variance in internalizing, externalizing, and thought disorders reduction, above and beyond the contribution of emotion regulation, religiosity, and will—to exist, live, and survive.