Religious Coping Activities Scale

1. Abstract

The Religious Coping Activities Scale (RCAS), developed by Kenneth I. Pargament and colleagues in 1990, represents a foundational psychometric milestone within the psychology of religion and clinical health psychology. Prior to its construction, psychological investigations into religion and health routinely relied on static, unidimensional demographic indices—such as organizational church attendance frequency, self-reported prayer rate, or general denominational membership. While informative, such metrics failed to illuminate the functional, cognitive, behavioral, and dynamic processes through which individuals mobilize their faith when navigating acute stress, severe medical crises, trauma, and personal loss. Rooted conceptually in transactional stress and coping theory, the RCAS operationalizes religious coping as a multidimensional phenomenon comprising six distinct strategies across 29 discrete items.

These six validated subscales encompass: Spiritually Based Coping (12 items evaluating personal, collaborative connection and guidance from God), Good Deeds (6 items measuring behavioral conformity to religious ethics, repentance, and prosocial engagement), Discontent (3 items tapping anger, alienation, and spiritual struggle directed toward God or the religious congregation), Interpersonal Religious Support (2 items reflecting tangible and emotional support solicited from clergy and fellow congregants), Plead (3 items assessing bargaining, questioning, and petitions for miraculous divine intervention), and Religious Avoidance (3 items capturing faith-based cognitive diversion and passive problem surrender). Each item is evaluated along an authentic 4-point Likert response scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 4 (a great deal). Initial standardization across 586 adult congregational members confronting stressful life circumstances demonstrated strong internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alphas ranging from moderate ($lpha = .61$) for brief subscales to excellent ($lpha = .92$) for the Spiritually Based Coping dimension. Extensive validation analyses established that the RCAS accounts for statistically significant unique variance in psychological adjustment, spiritual growth, and emotional distress over and above traditional religious metrics and general nonreligious coping styles.

2. Keywords

Religious Coping Activities Scale, RCAS, Kenneth Pargament, religious coping, spiritual struggle, transactional coping theory, spiritually based coping, psychological distress, measurement in psychology of religion, psychometrics

3. Authors

The Religious Coping Activities Scale was formulated, standardized, and psychometrically validated by a collaborative research team led by Kenneth I. Pargament, along with David S. Ensing, Kathryn Falgout, Herbert Olsen, Barbara Reilly, Kimberly Van Haitsma, and Richard Warren at Bowling Green State University, Ohio.

• Kenneth I. Pargament, Ph.D.: Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Bowling Green State University and Adjunct Professor in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine. Widely recognized as the pioneering architect of modern religious coping theory, Dr. Pargament has authored landmark treatises, including The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice (1997), and developed subsequent clinical assessment systems such as the RCOPE and Brief RCOPE.
• David S. Ensing, Ph.D.: Clinical and community psychologist whose research focuses on mental health service delivery, psychosocial rehabilitation, and community-level religious coping mechanisms.
• Kathryn Falgout, Herbert Olsen, Barbara Reilly, Kimberly Van Haitsma, Ph.D., and Richard Warren: Psychologists and research scientists at Bowling Green State University who contributed substantively to the scale’s empirical design, qualitative item generation, and congregational sampling methodology.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Religious Coping Activities Scale is to evaluate systematically the precise, qualitative cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and relational strategies through which individuals utilize religious traditions, practices, and beliefs to adapt to severe negative life events. During the late twentieth century, empirical investigations into the interface between religion, health, and coping were frequently constrained by simplistic methodological assumptions. Investigators routinely presumed that religious commitment was an invariant, positive buffer against emotional pathology, assessing it merely through global indicators such as denominational affiliation, frequency of institutional worship attendance, or doctrinal orthodoxy. However, these crude indicators obscured the mechanistic pathways of coping: two individuals with identical weekly church attendance may respond to terminal illness in radically divergent manners—one viewing the condition as a growth-oriented trial navigated hand-in-hand with a benevolent God, and the other experiencing debilitating alienation, divine abandonment, or passive helplessness.

In response to this conceptual void, Pargament et al. (1990) designed the RCAS to provide a nuanced, process-oriented assessment instrument capable of delineating both constructive and maladaptive manifestations of religious coping. Clinically, the scale equips psychologists, medical social workers, and chaplains with an empirically validated diagnostic framework to identify whether a patient’s spiritual life functions as a resource for resilience or as a locus of acute spiritual crisis and psychological distress. For instance, high elevations on the Discontent or Plead dimensions signal internal religious conflict, unresolved theological anger, and poor adaptation, alerting clinicians to the necessity of targeted pastoral or therapeutic interventions. Within academic research, the RCAS enables behavioral scientists, epidemiologists, and sociologists to test sophisticated transactional hypotheses, examine cross-cultural stress-buffering mechanisms, and track longitudinal trajectories of coping across severe life events such as bereavement, chronic illness, disaster recovery, and systemic community stressors.

5. Psychological Construct

The Religious Coping Activities Scale conceptualizes religious coping as an active, multidimensional search for significance in times of stress through sacred pathways. The construct operates across six distinct, functionally interdependent dimensions:

Spiritually Based Coping

Comprising 12 items, this foundational dimension assesses an individual’s direct, personal, and loving relationship with the divine. It measures cognitive reframing (e.g., perceiving personal trials as God-given opportunities for internal strengthening), surrender of uncontrollable outcomes to divine sovereignty, collaborative decision-making, and modeling one’s life upon religious figures such as Jesus Christ. Rather than passive submission, this dimension reflects active psychological collaboration with God, fostering emotional serenity, optimism, perceived control, and benevolent cognitive reappraisals.

Good Deeds

The Good Deeds dimension (6 items) captures behavioral and ethical modifications initiated in response to acute stress. It measures intentional acts of moral restitution, confession, attempts to reduce sinful behaviors, and active participation in prosocial congregational service and worship rituals. Individuals scoring high on this subscale endeavor to cope by bringing their personal conduct into stricter conformity with divine precepts, thereby reestablishing cognitive congruence, reducing guilt, and consolidating spiritual self-worth through altruistic action.

Discontent

Operationalized across 3 items, the Discontent subscale gauges religious strain, alienation, and spiritual struggle. It captures explicit feelings of anger toward God, emotional detachment from religious peers, and foundational questioning of one’s sacred beliefs in the face of suffering. Far from being a benign reflection of doubt, persistent religious discontent frequently reflects theological crisis, divine attribution of malice or neglect, and cognitive fragmentation, consistently correlating with depressive symptomatology, generalized anxiety, and impaired existential well-being.

Interpersonal Religious Support

Consisting of 2 targeted items, this subscale reflects the mobilization of the religious community as a concrete psychosocial safety net. It assesses the extent to which an individual actively solicits and receives emotional, practical, and pastoral guidance from clergy members and fellow congregants. This dimension quantifies the communal, structural social capital embedded within religious congregations, capturing the protective benefits of shared communal grief, prayer support, and collective solidarity.

Plead

The Plead dimension (3 items) measures an externalized, transactional, and petitionary coping orientation toward the sacred. High scorers engage in acute theological bargaining (e.g., promising future obedience in exchange for immediate crisis resolution), demand miraculous interventions, and actively interrogate God regarding why the trauma occurred. While petitionary prayer is a normative component of many religious traditions, persistent pleading often correlates with an external locus of control, intense distress, and unresolved theological wrestling.

Religious Avoidance

Spanning 3 items, the Religious Avoidance subscale captures faith-based cognitive diversion, denial, and spiritual bypassing. Rather than engaging in constructive problem-focused or emotion-focused resolution, individuals utilize religious practices—such as excessive scripture reading, prayer, or an exclusive cognitive focus on the afterlife—to suppress awareness of immediate earthly dilemmas, effectively deferring personal responsibility entirely to God.

6. Theoretical Framework

The architectural foundation of the Religious Coping Activities Scale is anchored at the convergence of Richard S. Lazarus and Susan Folkman’s transactional model of stress and coping (1984) and Kenneth I. Pargament’s integrative theory of religious coping (1997). In the transactional paradigm, coping is defined as the constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts deployed to manage specific external or internal demands appraised as taxing or exceeding personal resources. Lazarus and Folkman conceptualized coping as a dual process involving primary appraisal (evaluating what is at stake) and secondary appraisal (evaluating available options and coping resources).

Pargament integrated the sacred into this cognitive-transactional framework by proposing that religion serves as a uniquely pervasive, comprehensive lens through which individuals appraise their world and enact coping responses. According to Pargament’s theoretical model, religion enters the coping process in multiple capacities:

• As Part of the Orienting System: Prior religious beliefs, practices, relationships, and worldview orientations establish an antecedent cognitive schema that predisposes individuals toward particular appraisals of negative life events.
• In Primary and Secondary Appraisals: Individuals make religious appraisals of the stressor itself (e.g., appraising a cancer diagnosis as a punishment from God, a demonic attack, a divine test, or an act of benevolent providence) and appraise their religious resources (e.g., viewing God as a collaborative ally versus a distant sovereign).
• As Coping Activities: Religion provides specific behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and relational methods to manage the situation. These methods aim either at the conservation of significance (protecting cherished values, relationships, and meaning structures under threat) or the transformation of significance (fundamentally redefining meaning, identity, and life goals when preservation is impossible).

Within this theoretical rubric, Pargament delineated three primary problem-solving coping styles: Self-Directing (relying on personal agency rather than divine intervention), Deferring (passively abdicating all initiative to God), and Collaborative (viewing oneself and God as active, mutually engaged partners in problem resolution). The RCAS operationalizes these constructs: Spiritually Based Coping exemplifies collaborative problem-solving and positive transformation; Plead and Religious Avoidance embody deferring and escapist mechanisms; while Discontent marks a profound breakdown in the individual’s orienting system, precipitating an acute crisis of faith and relational strain with the sacred.

7. Validity

Empirical evidence establishing the psychometric validity of the Religious Coping Activities Scale was rigorously documented in the initial psychometric validation study by Pargament et al. (1990) and corroborated in subsequent empirical investigations across clinical, military, and developmental cohorts.

Construct and Factorial Validity

To establish construct validity, Pargament et al. evaluated the structural distinctiveness of the six subscales through principal components analysis with varimax rotation among 528 churchgoers experiencing acute negative events. Five distinct empirical factors accounted for virtually 100% of the common variance, cleanly segregating into Spiritually Based Coping, Good Deeds, Discontent, Plead, and Interpersonal Religious Support, while a theoretically driven sixth dimension (Religious Avoidance) formed a cohesive conceptual cluster.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

The scale’s predictive validity was established by utilizing the six subscales to predict three comprehensive domains of coping outcomes:

1. Mental Health Outcomes: Evaluated via standardized psychometric inventories assessing psychiatric symptoms, depressive manifestations, and global psychological well-being.
2. General Nonreligious Outcomes: A composite scale measuring personal growth, emotional mastery, perceived personal strengthening, and new insights derived from the stressor.
3. Religious Outcomes: Three targeted indicators measuring enhanced spiritual growth, subjective closeness to God, and deepened congregational belonging.

Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that Spiritually Based Coping served as a potent, robust positive predictor across all three outcome dimensions, correlating strongly with decreased psychological pathology and heightened personal and spiritual growth. The Good Deeds and Interpersonal Religious Support subscales exhibited consistent positive associations with constructive adaptation. Conversely, the Discontent subscale demonstrated uniform negative predictive validity, significantly predicting elevated emotional distress, psychological symptoms, and eroded well-being. The Plead subscale revealed a bifurcated pattern, demonstrating associations with elevated psychological distress alongside positive self-reported religious outcomes, accurately capturing the internal turmoil of individuals desperately seeking divine intervention.

Incremental Validity

A crucial empirical benchmark for any specialized psychological inventory is incremental validity. Pargament et al. demonstrated through hierarchical multiple regression that the six RCAS subscales accounted for statistically significant unique variance in coping outcomes over and above traditional, general religious indicators (such as global prayer frequency, attendance, and general intrinsic/extrinsic orientation). Furthermore, when entered after broad nonreligious coping inventories (such as the Ways of Coping Checklist), the RCAS continued to provide significant incremental predictive power, demonstrating that religious coping cannot be reduced to generic cognitive or behavioral coping mechanisms dressed in religious phraseology.

8. Reliability

The psychometric evaluation of the Religious Coping Activities Scale demonstrated acceptable to excellent internal consistency reliability across its six constituent subscales, particularly when accounting for varying subscale item counts:

• Spiritually Based Coping: Demonstrates high internal consistency with a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .92$ across its 12 items, reflecting robust item homogeneity and structural coherence.
• Good Deeds: Demonstrates solid internal consistency with an alpha of $\alpha = .82$ for its 6 items.
• Interpersonal Religious Support: Yields a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .78$ across its 2 items, which is notably high for a two-item psychometric index.
• Discontent: Yields an adequate alpha coefficient of $\alpha = .68$ across its 3 items.
• Plead: Yields an internal reliability of $\alpha = .61$ across its 3 items.
• Religious Avoidance: Demonstrates an alpha of $\alpha = .61$ across its 3 items.

While the internal consistency estimates for the brief 3-item subscales (Plead and Religious Avoidance) are modest, they remain fully acceptable for research purposes according to standard psychometric criteria for brief scales, where Cronbach’s alpha is inherently constrained by scale length. Test-retest reliability evaluations across short-to-medium intervals in subsequent literature have confirmed that while situational religious coping fluctuates dynamically in response to stressor resolution, the underlying coping styles measured by the RCAS exhibit satisfactory stability over active coping phases.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the RCAS was empirically determined using exploratory factor analytic methods during the primary validation study by Pargament et al. (1990). The original item pool consisted of 31 candidate items generated from comprehensive qualitative interviews with clergy, clinical analyses of personal written narratives of coping, and existing psychological literature. These items were administered to a sample of 528 churchgoers who had actively confronted a major stressful life event during the previous 12 months.

The data were subjected to a principal components factor analysis followed by orthogonal (varimax) rotation:

• Factor 1: Spiritually Based Coping: Accounted for the largest proportion of common variance, defined by 12 items exhibiting robust factor loadings (predominantly ranging from .50 to .80). Items on this factor centered on personal divine communion, perceived guidance, loving care, and cognitive reinterpretation through faith.
• Factor 2: Good Deeds: Defined cleanly by 6 items capturing moral behavior, confession, repentance, ritual attendance, and church-based altruism.
• Factor 3: Discontent: Composed of 3 items cleanly isolating spiritual struggle, alienation, and hostility toward God and the religious body.
• Factor 4: Interpersonal Religious Support: Formed by 2 items loading specifically on tangible support received from clergy and fellow congregational members.
• Factor 5: Plead: Composed of 3 items reflecting intense questioning of God, pleading for miracles, and bargaining for relief.

These five empirically derived factors accounted for close to 100% of the common variance in the analyzed item matrix. A small subset of three candidate items did not load significantly onto any of the five primary factors; however, because these three items (“Focused on the world-to-come rather than the problems of this world,” “I let God solve my problems for me,” and “Prayed or read the Bible to keep my mind off my problems”) clearly defined a theoretically critical construct—faith-based cognitive diversion and passive surrender—they were retained and synthesized into a dedicated sixth subscale: Religious Avoidance. Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) conducted in diverse health and trauma samples have validated the structural utility of this multidimensional model, which ultimately paved the way for Pargament’s later two-factor macro-structural model distinguishing between general Positive and Negative religious coping.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Religious Coping Activities Scale is an easily administered, self-report psychometric inventory designed for completion in approximately 10 to 15 minutes. Key structural parameters of the instrument include:

• Construct Assessed: Multidimensional qualitative strategies of religious coping utilized in confronting negative life stressors.
• Item Count: 29 distinct self-report statements (organized conceptually across 6 subscales).
• Administration Format: Standard paper-and-pencil self-report or computer-administered survey questionnaire.
• Subscale Allocation:
  • Spiritually Based Coping: 12 items
  • Good Deeds: 6 items
  • Discontent: 3 items
  • Interpersonal Religious Support: 2 items
  • Plead: 3 items
  • Religious Avoidance: 3 items
• Response Scale: Authentic 4-point Likert scale formatted as follows:
  • 1 = not at all
  • 2 = somewhat
  • 3 = quite a bit
  • 4 = a great deal
• Target Population: Adults and older adolescents navigating acute or chronic life stressors (e.g., bereavement, medical diagnoses, occupational crisis, family disruption).
• Scoring Protocol: Ratings of all items within each distinct subscale are summed and averaged by dividing by the number of items in that subscale. This procedure yields an interpretable mean subscale score ranging from 1.00 to 4.00 for each of the six dimensions. Higher scores reflect greater reliance on that specific religious coping mechanism. Subscales are intentionally analyzed independently rather than collapsed into an omnibus global score to preserve critical distinctions between adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Religious Coping Activities Scale was formally published in 1990 in the American Journal of Community Psychology. The instrument was placed into the public scientific domain by its authors for non-commercial academic, research, and clinical assessment purposes. No licensing fees or purchase royalties are required for bona fide scientific investigations, doctoral dissertations, or clinical program evaluations. Researchers and mental health professionals utilizing the instrument are expected to maintain the integrity of the scale items, adhere to standardized scoring protocols, and provide appropriate scholarly citation to the foundational validation study (Pargament et al., 1990).

12. References

The foundational and supportive academic publications substantiating the development, validation, and clinical application of the RCAS include:

• Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer Publishing Company.
• Pargament, K. I. (1997). The psychology of religion and coping: Theory, research, practice. Guilford Press.
• Pargament, K. I., Ensing, D. S., Falgout, K., Olsen, H., Reilly, B., Van Haitsma, K., & Warren, R. (1990). God help me: (I): Religious coping efforts as predictors of the outcomes to significant negative life events. American Journal of Community Psychology, 18(6), 793–824. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00938065
• Pargament, K. I., Ishler, K., Dubow, E. F., Stanik, P., Rouiller, R., Crowe, P., Cullman, E. P., Albert, M., & Royster, B. J. (1994). Methods of religious coping with the Gulf War: Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 33(4), 347–361. https://doi.org/10.2307/1386494
• Pargament, K. I., Olsen, H., Reilly, B., Falgout, K., Ensing, D. S., & Van Haitsma, K. (1992). God help me (II): The relationship of religious orientations to religious coping with negative life events. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 31(4), 504–513. https://doi.org/10.2307/1386859
• Park, C. L., & Cohen, L. H. (1993). Religious and nonreligious coping with the death of a friend. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 17(6), 561–577. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01176079
• Shortz, J. L., & Worthington, E. L., Jr. (1994). Young adults’ recall of religiosity, attributions, and coping in parental divorce. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 33(2), 172–179. https://doi.org/10.2307/1386603

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)