Five-Dimension Scale of Religiosity (FDSR)

Abstract

The Five-Dimension Scale of Religiosity (FDSR), developed by sociologists Joseph E. Faulkner and Gordon F. DeJong in 1966, is an operational measurement instrument designed to empirically assess the multidimensional taxonomy of religious commitment originally conceptualized by Charles Y. Glock (1962). Grounded in the theoretical assertion that individual religiosity cannot be adequately represented as a single, global index, the FDSR systematically operationalizes five distinct core dimensions: ideological (religious beliefs), intellectual (religious knowledge and cognitive engagement), ritualistic (institutional and private religious practices), experiential (affective experiences and feelings of divine proximity), and consequential (the secular manifestations and moral effects of religious convictions in daily life). Comprising 23 items configured into five independent Guttman scalograms (ranging from four to five items per subscale), the instrument utilizes cumulative, ordinal response options with historically predetermined cutoffs to classify respondents according to cumulative thresholds of religious commitment. Psychometric evaluations across collegiate and community cohorts—notably the foundational Pennsylvania State University cohort ($N = 362$) and Clayton’s (1968) Southern university cohort ($N = 873$)—have consistently reported high coefficients of reproducibility exceeding the psychometric benchmark of .90 across all five subscales. Despite its structural reproducibility, the instrument has fueled persistent construct validity debates within sociology and psychometrics, centered on whether the dimensions represent autonomous facets or reflect a singular, dominant ideological core accounting for upwards of 80% of common variance. The FDSR remains a foundational instrument in research examining the sociology of religion, moral development, health outcomes, and behavioral attitudes.

Keywords

Five-Dimension Scale of Religiosity, FDSR, Charles Glock, Guttman scaling, multidimensional religiosity, ideological dimension, ritualistic behavior, experiential religiosity, coefficient of reproducibility, psychometrics

Authors

The Five-Dimension Scale of Religiosity was formulated and empirically validated by Joseph E. Faulkner and Gordon F. DeJong, both affiliated with the Department of Sociology and the Population Issues Research Center at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. Faulkner’s academic scholarship concentrated on the sociology of religion, institutional religious structures, and methodology in social measurement. Gordon F. DeJong is an eminent sociologist and demographer whose work spans social stratification, migration dynamics, population distribution, and empirical survey methodology. Correspondence regarding the scale’s original conceptualization and empirical structure was historically directed to the Department of Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Five-Dimension Scale of Religiosity (FDSR) is to provide an empirical, sociologically rigorous methodology for measuring individual religious commitment across five distinct life expressions, transcending reductionist unidimensional models that rely solely on single indicators such as church attendance frequency or denominational affiliation. For decades prior to the mid-1960s, empirical investigations in the sociology and psychology of religion suffered from oversimplified measurement protocols, treating religious orientation as a homogeneous, binary, or single-continuum construct. Charles Y. Glock (1962) disrupted this paradigm by theorizing that religious commitment functions across divergent domains, and Faulkner and DeJong (1966) designed the FDSR specifically to translate Glock’s conceptual typology into five standardized, psychometrically viable Guttman scales.

The FDSR is engineered for basic and applied sociological and behavioral research rather than diagnostic or clinical decision-making. Specifically, the scale was created to achieve several objectives:

• To quantify an individual’s placement on five distinct, non-aggregated continuums of religiosity: ideological, intellectual, ritualistic, experiential, and consequential.
• To apply the Guttman scalogram technique to religious attitudes, thereby verifying whether endorsement of rigorous, highly demanding religious behaviors or beliefs predictably implies the endorsement of less demanding, foundational items along a cumulative hierarchy.
• To investigate differential relationships between specific religious dimensions and sociological outcome variables, including premarital sexual permissiveness, attitudes toward death and suicide, demographic shifts, health behaviors, stress adaptation in aging populations, and civic participation.
• To settle theoretical debates regarding whether religiosity functions as a constellation of autonomous, modular attributes or as a hierarchically organized structure dominated by central doctrinal convictions.

Psychological Construct

The psychological and sociological construct quantified by the FDSR is multidimensional religious commitment, operationalized strictly along the five structural axes articulated by Glock (1962). Each dimension reflects a distinct manifestation of religious adherence:

1. The Ideological Dimension (Belief)

The ideological dimension encompasses the cognitive adherence to foundational tenets, dogmas, and theological claims prescribed by an institutional religious tradition. In the context of the Judaeo-Christian orientation upon which the scale was calibrated, this construct captures an individual’s internal conviction regarding the existence of an omniscient and personal Deity, the divine creation of the universe, divine intervention within human history, the necessity of personal repentance for sin, and the divine inspiration and infallibility of sacred scriptures. Individuals scoring high on this dimension endorse orthodox theological formulations without ambiguity or naturalistic qualification.

2. The Intellectual Dimension (Knowledge and Cognitive Inquiry)

The intellectual dimension addresses the degree to which an individual is informed about the basic facts, historical origins, literature, and foundational texts of their religious heritage, as well as their epistemological orientation toward religious versus secular truth claims. Items within this subscale assess objective familiarity with scripture (such as correctly identifying the four Christian Gospels or the books of the Pentateuch) and cognitive attitudes toward theological narratives (such as viewing the Genesis creation account as literal history or endorsing religious truth as transcendent over empirical and scientific inquiry). Faulkner and DeJong conceptualized this dimension as measuring the cognitive priority and literate mastery of faith systems.

3. The Ritualistic Dimension (Religious Practice)

The ritualistic dimension captures overt, behavioral demonstrations of religious commitment. This includes institutional practices—such as regular attendance at communal Sabbath worship services and adherence to formal sacramental ceremonies (e.g., sanctioning marriage through ecclesiastical rather than secular authorities)—as well as private devotions, such as frequency of personal prayer and time allocated to reading sacred literature. This subscale emphasizes behavioral performance and active commitment over passive doctrinal belief.

4. The Experiential Dimension (Feeling and Affect)

The experiential dimension captures the subjective, emotional, and phenomenological encounters that individuals attribute to divine interaction or transcendent awareness. This construct reflects the affective core of personal faith, including subjective feelings of direct proximity or communion with the Divine, the experiential acquisition of existential purpose and meaning that cannot be achieved secularly, psychological security and consolation in the confrontation with human mortality, and the conviction that personal faith illuminates realities inaccessible through human rationality alone.

5. The Consequential Dimension (Secular Effects)

The consequential dimension assesses the practical repercussions, behavioral choices, and ethical obligations that an individual exhibits in secular and civil spheres as a direct outcome of their religious framework. Unlike the ritualistic dimension, which measures practices explicitly directed toward institutional worship and religious devotions, the consequential dimension assesses secular morality and ethical decision-making. Topics include commercial trading on designated sacred days (e.g., Sunday blue laws), attitudes toward premarital sexual relationships among church participants, preferential voting for political candidates who openly profess religious dedication, and uncompromising financial honesty (e.g., refusal to falsify charitable tax deductions).

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework of the FDSR synthesizes Charles Y. Glock’s (1962) sociological model of religious commitment with Louis Guttman’s (1944, 1950) scalogram analysis. Glock asserted that across all world religions—despite deep divergence in theological content—religious commitment manifests across five universal dimensions: the ideological, the intellectual, the ritualistic, the experiential, and the consequential. Glock maintained that while these five dimensions may be empirically interrelated within specific institutional settings, they are conceptually autonomous; an individual could demonstrate profound intellectual grasp of religious doctrine without personally experiencing divine connection, or conversely, participate rigorously in institutional rituals while maintaining non-orthodox ideological views.

To capture these distinct domains without losing structural precision, Faulkner and DeJong rejected standard summative Likert scoring in favor of Guttman scalogram analysis. The foundational axiom of Guttman scaling is cumulativeness: items within a unidimensional scale must represent an ordered hierarchy of commitment or difficulty. An individual who endorses an item indicating a highly demanding or orthodox attitude should logically endorse all preceding, less demanding items along the continuum.

Formally, let $I_1, I_2, dots, I_k$ represent an ordered series of items ranging from least demanding to most demanding. An ideal Guttman scale ensures that a respondent’s total score $S = \sum_{j=1}^k x_j$ (where $x_j in {0, 1}$) precisely determines their response vector $(x_1, x_2, dots, x_k)$, such that:

$$x_j = 1 \quad \forall j le S \quad \text{and} \quad x_j = 0 \quad \forall j > S$$

By constructing five separate Guttman scalograms rather than a single compound scale, Faulkner and DeJong sought to evaluate whether Glock’s dimensions were each internally coherent and unidimensional, while simultaneously testing the degree to which the five domains maintained empirical autonomy from one another.

Validity

The construct, convergent, and discriminant validity of the FDSR has been the subject of extensive psychometric investigation and theoretical debate within the sociology of religion.

Construct Unidimensionality vs. Domain Independence

Initial validation studies by Faulkner and DeJong (1966), followed by independent replications by Clayton (1968), Clayton and Gladden (1974), and DeJong, Faulkner, and Warland (1976), demonstrated that each of the five subscales satisfied the formal psychometric criteria of unidimensionality under Guttman’s criteria. However, psychometricians demonstrated that internal unidimensionality of subscales does not guarantee their statistical independence from one another.

In the original 1966 investigation, inter-scale correlations ranged from moderate to moderately high: the highest association was observed between the ideological and intellectual scales ($r = .58$), while the lowest was recorded between the experiential and consequential scales ($r = .36$). Faulkner and DeJong argued that these moderate correlations provided empirical validation for multidimensionality, demonstrating that while the dimensions shared variance, they retained sufficient unique variance to represent distinct facets of religiosity.

The Ideological Primacy Debate

Subsequent psychometric scrutiny challenged this multidimensional interpretation. In comprehensive factor analytic investigations, Clayton (1968) and Clayton and Gladden (1974) subjected the intercorrelation matrices of the five dimensions to principal components and oblique factor rotations across independent cohorts ($N = 873$ in 1967; $N = 432$ in 1970). Their findings indicated that a single, dominant ideological factor accounted for 78% of the common variance in the 1967 cohort and 83% of the variance in the 1970 cohort. Second-order factor extractions yielded a clear unifactorial solution.

Clayton and Gladden concluded that Glock’s multidimensionality represented a “sacred artifact” of sociological theory rather than an empirical reality. They posited that individual religiosity operates fundamentally as a single ideological commitment, with ritual practice, experiential feelings, and intellectual acquisition representing secondary manifestations of that core theological allegiance.

Semantic Critique and Instrument Structure

Weigert and Thomas (1969) raised substantive concerns regarding the semantic construction of the FDSR items. They demonstrated that several items assigned to the intellectual and ritualistic scales shared overlapping semantic markers with the ideological scale (e.g., requiring respondents to report what they “believe,” “feel,” or “view” rather than testing objective knowledge or overt behavior). For example, the intellectual scale contained three items assessing personal doctrinal opinions (such as literal belief in biblical miracles and creationism) rather than purely objective religious knowledge. Faulkner and DeJong (1969) published a rejoinder clarifying that in sociological measurement, an individual’s cognitive processing of religious truth claims cannot be fully divorced from their interpretive worldview.

The Consequential Dimension Reconsidered

A decade after the scale’s release, DeJong, Faulkner, and Warland (1976) conducted a cross-cultural replication across American and international samples. Acknowledging the accumulating empirical data, they conceded that the consequential dimension exhibited structural instability and lower associations with the other four core domains. They suggested that social consequences and moral behaviors might be more accurately operationalized as dependent variables resulting from religious commitment, rather than constituent elements of the internal religious construct itself.

Reliability

Within classical test theory, reliability is conventionally estimated via internal consistency indices such as Cronbach’s alpha or test-retest correlations. However, because the FDSR was designed strictly under Guttman scalogram theory, its reliability and psychometric integrity were determined through the Coefficient of Reproducibility (CR) and the Coefficient of Scalability (CS).

The Coefficient of Reproducibility quantifies the degree to which a respondent’s complete pattern of item endorsements can be accurately reconstructed knowing only their total score. It is calculated using the formula:

$$CR = 1 – \frac{e}{N \times k}$$

where $e$ represents the total number of scalogram response errors across all respondents, $N$ is the sample size, and $k$ is the number of items in the scale. By psychometric convention, a scale is considered an acceptable Guttman scalogram if $CR ge .90$.

Empirical Reproducibility Statistics

• Pennsylvania State University Sample (Faulkner & DeJong, 1966; $N = 362$): All five subscales exceeded the standard threshold: Ideological ($CR = .92$), Intellectual ($CR = .91$), Ritualistic ($CR = .93$), Experiential ($CR = .91$), and Consequential ($CR = .90$). Minimum marginal reproducibilities were documented, verifying that scale reproducibility was not an artifact of extreme item marginal distributions.
• Southern Protestant University Sample (Clayton, 1968; $N = 873$): Clayton demonstrated that across an independent, geographically and denominationally distinct sample, all five scales yielded reproducibility coefficients that met or exceeded the Penn State benchmarks: Ideological ($CR = .94$), Intellectual ($CR = .92$), Ritualistic ($CR = .94$), Experiential ($CR = .93$), and Consequential ($CR = .91$).

Although test-retest coefficients were not formally reported in the early seminal literature, subsequent empirical studies applying the FDSR across longitudinal designs (e.g., Cole, 1982; Courtenay et al., 1992) have demonstrated temporal stability across adult cohorts when ideological environments remain constant.

Factor Analysis

Extensive exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory (CFA) factor analytic investigations have been conducted on the FDSR items to evaluate Glock’s proposed five-factor structure against unifactorial and hierarchical alternatives.

Principal Components and First-Order Factor Extraction

Clayton and Gladden (1974) re-analyzed inter-item correlation matrices using principal component analysis followed by Varimax and Oblique rotations. Rather than resolving into five distinct orthogonal factors, the analyses consistently revealed a powerful general factor:

• First Unrotated Factor (Ideological Core): Accounted for between 78.0% and 83.2% of the common variance across multiple administrations. The items displaying the highest factor loadings on this primary axis were drawn almost exclusively from the Ideological subscale (e.g., belief in a personal, omniscient God; belief in the divine inspiration and truth of scripture; factor loadings $> .75$).
• Secondary Factors: Extracted secondary factors accounted for marginal variance (typically between 4% and 7% each) and corresponded loosely to ritualistic attendance behaviors and institutional loyalty. The experiential items loaded substantially across both the primary ideological factor and secondary affective components.

Higher-Order Factor Models

When researchers specified oblique models allowing factors to correlate, second-order factor analysis collapsed the five sub-dimensions into a singular, overarching construct of General Religious Commitment. Factor loadings of the first-order dimension scores onto the general second-order factor were documented as follows:

• Ideological Dimension: $lambda = .89$ to $.94$
• Intellectual Dimension: $lambda = .72$ to $.78$
• Experiential Dimension: $lambda = .68$ to $.74$
• Ritualistic Dimension: $lambda = .61$ to $.69$
• Consequential Dimension: $lambda = .42$ to $.51$

These findings substantiate the empirical interpretation that while the FDSR scales are internally cumulative and reproducible, they represent structured behavioral, affective, and cognitive expressions stemming from a core ideological commitment, with the consequential dimension exhibiting the lowest saturation on the general factor.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Five-Dimension Scale of Religiosity (FDSR)
• Authors: Joseph E. Faulkner and Gordon F. DeJong (1966)
• Theoretical Foundation: Charles Y. Glock’s (1962) 5-D taxonomy of religious commitment
• Instrument Type: Multi-scale self-report questionnaire configured as five independent Guttman scalograms
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil or computer-assisted self-administered survey
• Total Item Count: 23 items
  • Ideological Scale: 5 items
  • Intellectual Scale: 4 items
  • Ritualistic Scale: 5 items
  • Experiential Scale: 5 items
  • Consequential Scale: 4 items
• Response Options: Multiple-choice and rating options ranging from 2 to 6 specific categorical options per item. Each item has one or more options designated as the “keyed traditional religious response” (indicated historically by an asterisk).
• Target Population: Adolescents, university students, and adult general populations within Western, Judaeo-Christian sociocultural contexts.
• Administration Time: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes.
• Scoring Procedure:
  • Scoring is conducted independently for each of the five subscales.
  • Each item is scored dichotomously: 1 point if the respondent selects an endorsed/keyed traditional religious response (marked with an asterisk in original coding keys), and 0 points if an unkeyed response is selected.
  • Subscale Raw Scores: Calculated by summing the dichotomously scored positive items within each dimension:
    • Ideological Scale: Range 0 to 5
    • Intellectual Scale: Range 0 to 4
    • Ritualistic Scale: Range 0 to 5
    • Experiential Scale: Range 0 to 5
    • Consequential Scale: Range 0 to 4
  • Guttman Interpretation: Under ideal scalogram properties, a respondent’s raw score specifies not only the quantity of endorsed items but the exact qualitative threshold of endorsement (i.e., affirming all items up to the threshold of difficulty). Group data may be converted to percentages of positive endorsements across scale levels.
  • Summary Score: The authors strongly advised against summing across all 23 items into a single composite score, emphasizing the qualitative distinctiveness of the individual dimensional scores.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Five-Dimension Scale of Religiosity was originally published in 1966 in the peer-reviewed sociological journal Social Forces (University of North Carolina Press). The scale items, scoring protocols, and scalogram guidelines were placed in the public scientific domain via publication in Faulkner and DeJong (1966). No licensing fees, commercial royalties, or formal permissions are required for non-commercial academic research, pedagogical purposes, or institutional investigations.

Researchers intending to administer the instrument in contemporary empirical settings must cite the foundational publication (Faulkner & DeJong, 1966). The instrument was designed strictly for academic, observational, and survey research purposes; it lacks standardized clinical norms and is not validated or recommended for psychological diagnostics, clinical evaluation, or pastoral certification.

References

• Clayton, R. R. (1968). Religiosity in 5-D: A southern test. Social Forces, 47(1), 80–83. https://doi.org/10.2307/2574716
• Clayton, R. R., & Gladden, J. W. (1974). The five dimensions of religiosity: Toward de-mythologizing a sacred artifact. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 13(2), 135–144. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384377
• Cole, G. E. (1982). Relationships among measures of mental health, stress, and religiosity (Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale). Dissertation Abstracts International, 43-05, 1433A.
• Courtenay, B. C., Poon, L., Martin, P., & Clayton, G. (1992). Religiosity and adaptation in the oldest-old. International Journal of Aging & Human Development, 34(1), 47–56. https://doi.org/10.2190/70GE-J13P-N89B-H84U
• DeJong, G. F., Faulkner, J. E., & Warland, R. H. (1976). Dimensions of religiosity reconsidered: Evidence from a cross-cultural study. Social Forces, 54(4), 866–889. https://doi.org/10.2307/2576785
• Domino, G., & Miller, K. (1992). Religiosity and attitudes toward suicide. Omega – Journal of Death and Dying, 25(4), 271–282. https://doi.org/10.2190/L58T-7GHE-W6E4-M1AE
• Faulkner, J. E., & DeJong, G. F. (1966). Religiosity in 5-D: An empirical analysis. Social Forces, 45(2), 246–254. https://doi.org/10.2307/2575384
• Faulkner, J. E., & DeJong, G. F. (1969). On measuring the religious variable: Rejoinder to Weigert and Thomas. Social Forces, 48(2), 263–267. https://doi.org/10.2307/2575451
• Ford, R. N. (1950). A rapid scoring procedure for scaling attitude questions. Public Opinion Quarterly, 14(3), 507–532. https://doi.org/10.1086/266224
• Glock, C. Y. (1962). On the study of religious commitment. Religious Education: Research Supplement, 57(4), S98–S110. https://doi.org/10.1080/003440862057S407
• Guttman, L. (1944). A basis for scaling qualitative data. American Sociological Review, 9(2), 139–150. https://doi.org/10.2307/2086306
• Lenes, M. S., & Hart, E. J. (1975). The influence of pornography and violence on attitudes and guilt. Journal of School Health, 45(8), 447–451. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1746-1561.1975.tb06821.x
• Ruppel, H. J. (1970). Religiosity and premarital sexual permissiveness: A response to the Reiss-Heltsley and Broderick debate. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 32(4), 647–655. https://doi.org/10.2307/350259
• Weigert, A. J., & Thomas, D. L. (1969). Religiosity in 5-D: A critical note. Social Forces, 48(2), 260–263. https://doi.org/10.2307/2575450

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)