A psychometric evaluation of the Scale of Attitude Towards Prayer (Francis & Brown, 1990)

Abstract

Recently there has been an increased interest in the use of prayer as a measure of religiosity within empirical research. Additionally, there has been a departure from the use of single-item measures of prayer frequency. One such departure has been the development of the Scale of Attitude Towards Prayer (Francis & Brown, 1990), which uses six items to measure attitude towards prayer. The present study provided a factor analytical evaluation of the Scale of Attitude Towards Prayer, including an examination of the reliability of the scale, to supplement limited existing data. The measure was administered among a sample of 518 Irish respondents. Although the scale was found to be reliable, exploratory factor analysis revealed that items 2 and 6 did not load very highly on the underlying factor.