Religious Attributions of Responsibility: AReview of Empirical Literature and

Development of an Instrument

JUSTIN BAILEYJEFFREY A. HAYES

A critical review of the religious attribution literature is presented. Two overriding critiques arethat the field lacks adequate instruments to measure religious attributions, and that attributionsrelated to problem causeare confused with attributions about problem solution. Consequently, aninstrument was developed to measure religious attributions of responsibility for problem causeandsolution. An exploratory, principal-axis factor analysis conductedon data generated by 457 uni­versity students revealed the theorized factors of cause and solution. High internalconsistency andtest-retest reliability wereobtained. A subsequent confirmatory factor analysis on a separate sampleof 179 students provided evidence of construct validity for the instrument. Research questions arepresented that would advance current understanding of religious attributions, and limitations ofthe instrument are noted.

More than two decades ago, Proudfoot and Shaver (1976) described the parallelbetween religious attributions and social psychological attribution theories, not­ing that "attribution theory, with its emphasis on beliefs and interpretations ofexperience,provides a natural pathinto the realm ofreligion" (p.328). Theypointedout that studies on religious phenomena could profitably emulate attributionresearch in social psychology, such as Weiner's (1972) investigations ofattributional approaches to motivation. Gorsuch and Smith (1983) also exam­ined the similarities between religious and social psychological attributions,emphasizing that people view God as a personal being and therefore may makeattributions to God comparable to attributions made about others. They notedthat because religion is a multidimensional concept, however, social psychologytheories may not fully account for how attributions to God are made. They con­cluded that studying attributions to God in the context of social psychology'sattribution literature may be a productive framework from which to work, butthey recommended that researchers not be constrained by existing theory.

Most of the research that has ensued has examined religious attributions asa dependent variable. The general goal of these studies has been to predict a

Justin Bailey is a doctoral student, and Jeffrey A. Hayes is an assistant professor, both inthe Department of Counselor Education, Counseling Psychology, and Rehabilitation Ser­vices at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Portions of this article werepresented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Toronto,Canada, 1996. The authors thank Ruben Echemendia, Michael Hall, David Rothenthal,and Beverly Vandiver for help on drafts of this article, and Donna Kiley for assistancewith data entry. Correspondence regarding this article should be sent to Jeffrey A. Hayes,Counseling Psychology Program, Pennsylvania State University, 312 Cedar Building, Uni­versity Park, PA 16802 (e-mail: jxh34@psu.edu).

Counseling and Values / October 1998/ Vol. 43 49

person's religious attributions as a function of variables such as religiousaffiliation, religious practices, or personal past experiences. A few studies, onthe other hand, have examined religious attributions as a predictor of othervariables, such as coping success. We first evaluate those articles in whichreligious attributions are treated as a predictor variable, followed by a critiqueof studies in which religious attributions are considered a dependent variable.

RELIGIOUSAITRIBUTION AS AN INDEPENDENT VARIABLE

Three studies to date have investigated how attributions to God are used ascoping mechanisms that affect mental health. In the first of these studies,Pargament et al. (1990)asked Christian church members to list the most seri­ous negative event in their lives in the past year and how they coped with thatevent. The authors found that mental health was positively associated withattributing responsibility for the eventto a benevolentGod or to God as a partner.The instrument used to measure religious attributions and other coping ac­tivities was a 31-item scale created by the authors. It contained six subscaleswith relatively good internal consistency, ranging from .61 to .92. The factorloadings of the individual items on their subscales ranged from .45 to .80.Although this retrospective study found significant correlations between re­ligious attributions and coping outcomes, the direction of causality amongvariables could not be specified.

Shortz and Worthington (1994) investigated the role of causal religious at­tributions in predicting coping activities. They asked 131 undergraduateswhose parents had divorced to answer a questionnaire concerning their be­liefs about the cause of their parents' divorce. Individuals who made causalattributions to God's anger were more likely to deal with the divorce throughreligious discontent and religious pleading than were individuals who madeattributions to other forces.Religious pleading was less likely if individuals madeattributions to God's love rather than other causal agents. Participants who be­lieved that God's will was the cause for their parents' divorce were more likely touse religion in their coping than individuals who reported beliefs in other causes.

Shortz and Worthington's findings indicate that retrospective causal attri­butions predict different coping strategies, but several methodologicallimita­tions make these findings tentative. Their sample consisted of mostly Christianundergraduates, limiting the generalizability of their findings. Respondentswere asked to make attributions about their parents' divorce, which occurredan average of 7.2 years previously. Accounting for years since divorce mayhave yielded differences in the students' attributions, as they may have madedifferent attributions of recent past events compared with distant past events.Finally, the authors used an eight-item measure of religious and other attri­butions with unknown psychometric properties.

Park and Cohen (1993) interviewed 96 Christian undergraduates who hadhad a friend die within the previous year. The authors used path analyses todetermine that students who believed that a purposeful God was involved in

50 COunseling and Values / October 1998 / Vol. 43

causing the death reported higher personal growth than did students whorated other causes as more responsible for their friend's death. Park and Cohendemonstrated a sophisticated approach to studying religious attributions byusing path analyses; however, they only studied Christian students and useda one-item measure of personal growth. Furthermore, their sample of 96 stu­dents was small considering the large number of variables and path analyses.

Critique

The use of religious attributions as an independent variable seems to be apotentially meaningful way to predict individual reactions to events. Unfor­tunately, only three studies to date examine religious attributions in a predic­tive capacity, and all three used homogeneous (i.e., Christian) samples. Thecorrelational statistics used in two of the three studies leave the direction ofcausality between religious attributions and other variables in question. Parkand Cohen's (1993) use of path analysis was laudable, but their sample sizelimited the utility of such analyses. Qualitative approaches and structural equa­tion modeling may prove beneficial to further our understanding of religiousattributions and coping with life events.

Currently, a variety of unexamined variables may be predicted by religiousattributions, such as attitudes toward help seeking, expectations about coun­seling, self-efficacy, beliefs about change, locus of control, goal achievement,and help-seeking behaviors. In addition, existing studies examining religiousattributions as an independent variable either confuse attributions of respon­sibility for problem cause and solution or examine only one of the two. Previ­ous research and theory outside the religious realm has usefully distinguishedattributions of responsibility for the cause of and solution to events (Brickmanet al., 1982;Hayes & Wall, 1998;McCracken, Hayes, & Dell, 1997;Tracey, 1988;Worthington & Atkinson, 1993, 1996). Finally, very little information is avail­able about the religious attributions of non-White or non-Christian individuals.

All three studies reviewed here laudably used real rather than contrivedsituations about which respondents made attributions. This methodologyenhances external validity and prohibits conclusions being drawn from hy­pothetical events. It should be noted, however, that people may experiencesimilar events in different ways. People who have experienced the death of afriend, for example, may make different attributions about the event if the friendwere a drunk driver as opposed to being hit by a drunk driver. How an eventoccurred and how important it is to a person may be more important to one'sattributions than the type of event. Nonetheless, future researchers wouldbenefit from continuing to examine specific, real-life events.

RELIGIOUSATIRIBUTIONS AS A DEPENDENT VARIABLE

Several studies have examined variables that predict religious attributions.These empirical investigations attempt to understand the components that

Counseling and Values / October 1998/ Vol. 43 51

factor into the ascription of responsibility for events. In a representative ar­ticle, Pargament et a1.(1988) described three styles of coping used by churchmembers in their relationship with God: self-directing, deferring, and collabo­rating. By asking 197 church members how they use their relationship withGod in coping with life problems, the authors developed a 36-item question­naire to classify individuals' relationships with God in problem solving. Thethree resulting scales measured whether people thought God gave them free­dom to solve their own problems (self-directing), God was responsible for thesolution to a problem (deferring), or that the relationship a person has withGod determines solutions to problems (collaborating). Pargament et al. (1988)developed a reliable questionnaire to measure these three styles of religiousattributions. The internal consistencies of the scales were all very strong (i.e.,greater than .90).The collaborative scale score, however, was moderately cor­related to the deferring scale (.47), making their distinctiveness from each othersomewhat questionable.

The external validity of the Pargament et al. (1988) study is limited in tworegards. First, participants were selected exclusively from two Christianchurches, excluding from consideration both individuals who do not attendchurch and non-Christians. Second, participants were asked to react to gen­eral hypothetical problems as opposed to actual, specific events. The lack ofproblem specificity may have influenced respondents' attributions in that theycould have reacted to academic, social, financial, or superficial problems, eachof which might elicit different attributions.

In two similar studies, Lupfer, Brock, and De Paola (1992) and Lupfer, DePaola, Brock, and Clement (1994) compared the attributions of religious andsecular undergraduates to hypothetical events. These researchers found thatmore conservative Christians believed that God and Satan caused events moreoften than did less conservative Christians. Furthermore, for all students, attribu­tions to God were more likely when an outcome was beneficial, and attributionsto Satan were more likely when an outcome was detrimental. All participantswere more likely to attribute events to secular causes than religious causes. Reli­gious events, however, were found to elicit more attributions to God and Satanthan did secular events.

Lupfer et al. (1992)found that dispositional and situational factors accountedfor 89%of the respondents' attributions, compared with 7%for God, 2%for chance,and 2% for Satan. The 1994study (Lupfer et aI., 1994) found similar results: 90%of the respondents made attributions to situational and dispositional factors, 6%to God, 2% to Satan, and 1% to chance. This suggests that religious attributionsare rarely used in determining the causes of everyday events.

The most serious limitation of these studies was that they used a five-item ques­tionnaire with no known psychometric properties to determine participants' beliefsabout the causes of events. An instrument with established psychometric prop­erties would enhance confidence in the findings from these studies.

Pargament and Hahn (1986) investigated how attributions to God are madein relation to the cause of health-related situations for 124 undergraduates.

52 Counseling and Values / October 1998/ Vol. 43

They developed 16 vignettes to describe responsible or irresponsible behav­ior with positive or negative outcomes, and respondents were asked to imag­ine that they were the characters in the scenarios. These authors found thatwhen the vignettes described an unjust situation, individuals made more at­tributions to God's will than to God's anger or love. Attributions to God's lovewere more frequent with positive outcomes than attributions to God's angeror will, and more attributions were made to God's anger in negative situa­tions than to God's love or will. Overall, people were more likely to attributeGod's love as the cause for events than God's anger or will. The authors hy­pothesized that this may be because people tend to see God as a means ofsupport.

Respondents in this study were asked to rate the extent to which the out­come of an event was due to God, which confuses the concepts of the causeof and the solution to an event. Participants may have responded from theirbelief that the event occurred because of God, or from their belief that Godwas responsible for the outcome of the event. The study's conclusions alsowere limited by the use of a five-item attribution questionnaire for whichno psychometric properties were reported. The external validity of the studyis hampered by a homogenous White Christian student sample. Further­more, vignettes were created in which respondents were asked to imaginethemselves as the characters, which may not be reflective of how individu­als react to actual situations.

Landrine and Klonoff (1994)examined causal attributions for illness, com­paring 79 White college students with 70 college students of color. Studentsgenerated their own lists of causes for why people obtain illnesses. Studentswere then asked to rate how important these causes were on a seven-pointLikert scale. Although there were no racial differences in the types of causesgenerated, slight differences in gender, age, and religious orientation emerged.Participants were then asked to rate 37 causes provided by the authors as tohow important they were in causing illness. People of color rated supernatu­ral causes, such as God's punishment or sinful acts, as more important incausing illness than did White students, although most students in generalrated supernatural causes low in importance.

Landrine and Klonoff (1994) contributed a multicultural finding to the lit­erature by examining differences between the religious attributions of peopleof color and Whites. Nonetheless, the measure of supernatural attributionscreated by the authors had an internal consistency of .51, and no other psy­chometric properties of this instrument were reported.

Spilka and Schmidt (1983) studied undergraduates and church membersand discovered that attributions for the cause of an event were made to Godmore often when the events had greater importance, were more personal, orwere positive. No effect was found for the experimental setting (in a church orin a classroom) on participants' attributions. The drawbacks of this studyinvolve the use of a single question to measure religious attributions, hypo­thetical vignettes, and a sample limited to Christians.

Counseling and Values / October 1998/ Vol. 43 53

Kunst, Tan, and Bjorck (1994) asked 329 undergraduates to rate extremelynegative, hypothetical events in terms of how much God's will, God's love,evil forces, or forces of nature affected their cause. Participants made attribu­tions to God or evil forces more often than to forces of nature. In addition, moreconservative Christians attributed causal responsibility to God and evil forcesmore often than did less conservative Christians. The authors reported a strongtendency for respondents to attribute the cause of extremely negative events toexternal forces, which is consistent with a self-serving bias (Miller& Ross, 1975).

Kunst et al. (1994)studied a relatively diverse sample of participants (45%White and 71% Christian), although all participants were undergraduates.The instrument used to measure religious attributions had no reported psy­chometric properties and did not distinguish between God's role in causingand solving the event.

Critique

All of the articles using religious attributions as a dependent variable suf­fered from similar limitations. These can be summarized as limitations ofgeneralizability, method, and measurement.

Generalizability. The goal of the religious attribution literature is to examinehow people make sense of the world through their religion, and how theirbeliefs affect their lives, their mental health, and their decisions.Quasiexperimental studies have focused on specific aspects of religious attri­butions and extrapolated these findings to explain how groups of people makeattributions. These extrapolations lose their explanatory power if the partici­pant samples are not representative of society in general or if the situations inthe studies do not represent real-life situations. Many of the studies in thisarea have deficiencies in these categories.

Given that cultural differences may influence religious attributions, thesestudies are hampered by their reliance on Christian collegiate samples. Fu­ture research would benefit from examining nonstudents with varying reli­gious beliefsand levelsof commitment to religion.Religiousattributionmeasures,then, would need to be validated for their utility with non-Christians.

Method. All of the empirical articles in which religious attribution was adependent variable used vignettes of a person in a hypothetical situation. Thismay limit our ability to assess real-world reactions and beliefs. Wright (1983)criticized the religious attribution literature for relying upon vignettes to ob­tain information. He suggested that the lack of a real-world experience to re­act to renders the literature on religious attributions suspect. Research onreligious attributions needs to encompass actual reactions to lifeevents to moreaccurately predict how people use such attributions in their everyday lives.

A solution to the problems with hypothetical vignettes was developed byPargament et al. (1990).These authors asked participants to list the most se­rious event in their lives during the previous year. This strategy allows par­ticipants to respond to events that have real-life implications and is not limited

54 COunseling and Values I October 1998 I Vol. 43

by the problems of imagining an event to have occurred. Although such a designmakes controlling for the type of event difficult, the differences people have intheir reactions to similarevents may make controllingevent type a futile exerciseanyway.

Measurement. The integrity of the religious attribution literature may be ques­tioned on the grounds of a lack of solid measurement practices. Five of the studiesused somewhat similar five-item questionnaires to determine to what forces peopleascribe the cause of events, but these instruments had no established psychomet­ric properties. Landrine and Klonoff (1994) created a religious causal attributionscale with eight supernatural causes, but this scale had an internal consistencyof .51. Scales that accurately measure a construct are essential to valid conclu­sions, yet some studies used a one-item, poorly worded question to measure reli­gious attributions. Clearly, instruments need to be developed with soundpsychometric properties to advance our understanding of religious attributions.

Another consistent problem in the literature is the lack of distinction betweencause and solution in attributions about problems. Although many of the articlesdiscuss causal beliefs and coping strategies, it is often unclear how authors havedifferentiated these concepts. It has been shown that a person's causal attribu­tions are often unrelated to attributions of responsibility for problem solution(Brickman et aI., 1982),yet the common approach in this literature confused theseconcepts. Studies of religious attributions might be enhanced by distinguishingbetween judgments of responsibility for the cause of an event and the solution toan event.

Nonreligious attributions of responsibility for problem cause and solution havebeen studied extensively in the psychological literature. Brickman et a1. (1982)provided much of the impetus for this research by postulating four models perti­nent to the attribution of responsibility for the cause of and solution to problems:(a) the moral model-an individual is responsible for both the cause of and solu­tion to a problem; (b) the compensatory model-an individual is not responsiblefor the cause of a problem but is responsible for its solution; (c) the enlightenmentmodel-an individual is responsible for the cause of a problem but not for thesolution; and (d) the medical model-an individual is responsible for neitherproblem cause nor solution. Applying this conceptual framework to religiousattributions may be a helpful way to classify individuals' beliefs about the re­sponsibility God (or another higher power) has for the cause of and solution toproblematic life events.

DEVELOPMENTOF AN INSlRUMENTTO MEASURE RELIGIOUSAT1RIBUTIONS

We used Brickmanet al.' s (1982)framework in assessing religious attributions ofresponsibility for personal problems. Attributions of God's responsibility werecategorized as either high or low for the cause of and solution to problematiclife events. We also developed corresponding models to classify individualsinto one of four views of God: (a) God as observer: the individual does not see

Counseling and Values / October 1998/ Vol. 43 55

God as responsible for either problem cause or solution; (b) God as creator:the individual makes attributions of responsibility to God for the cause of butnot the solution to problems; (c) God as savior: God is viewed as responsiblefor solving but not causing problems; and (d) God as omnipotent: God is heldresponsible for both the cause of and solution to problems.

METHOD

Participants

A total of 437undergraduate and graduate students from psychology, educa­tional psychology, and counselor education courses at Pennsylvania StateUniversity were given extra course credit to participate in the study. The sampleconsisted of 324 (74%) women, 100 (23%) men, and 13 (3%) individuals whodid not report their gender. The ethnic composition of the sample was 383(88%) European Americans, 12 (3%)African Americans, 11 (3%)Asian Ameri­cans, 8 (2%) Hispanic Americans, and 3 (1%) persons of other ethnicities; 20(5%) individuals did not identify their ethnicity. The average age of partici­pants was 22.2 years.

Instrument

A questionnaire was rationally derived to reflect the dimensions of responsi­bility for the cause of and solution to problems. In the cause dimension, ques­tions were created to assess the amount of responsibility attributed to God forcausing a specific event. In the solution dimension, questions were designedto ascertain the degree to which responsibility is attributed to God for solvingor overcoming the problem. Questions from previous literature were consid­ered, and from an initial pool of 54 questions generated separately by theauthors, 29 were chosen to represent the two dimensions of problem causeand solution. Items were worded so that participants rated the degree to whichthey agreed or disagreed with each item on a seven-point Likert scale (1 =stronglyagree, 7 = stronglydisagree).

Procedure

Participants were asked to describe in writing the most negative event theyhad experienced in the past year and respond to 29 items in regard to thatevent (e.g., "God is responsible for a solution to the event"). To examine test­retest reliability, subsamples of participants were provided the written de­scription of the event they had generated previously and were asked to completethe same instrument 1 to 4 weeks later. In addition, a subsample of 252 par­ticipants also completed Pargament and Hahn's (1986) one-item measure ofcausal attributions to God's will or purpose, God's love or reward, and God'sanger or punishment.

56 Counseling and Values / October 1998/ Vol. 43

RESULTS

The 29items were subjected to an exploratory, principal-axis factor analysis withoblique rotation; an oblique rotation was chosen because of the possibility thatfactors might be correlated. The criteria used to retain factors was parallel analy­sis (Lautenschlager, 1989). In parallel analysis, random numbers are used togenerate a correlation matrix containing the same number of variables and sub­jects as the data set under investigation. A factor analysis is then conducted onthe randomly generated correlation matrix and eigenvalues are obtained. Eigen­values from the actual data set that exceed those of the same order obtained fromthe randomly generated matrix are retained. Parallel analysis is thought to pro­duce more accurate factor solutions than Kaiser's rule, scree tests, or other deter­minants of the number of factors to retain (Zwick & Velicer, 1986).

Using parallel analysis, two factors were retained that accounted for 67%of the variance among items; eigenvalues for the factors were 16.58and 2.87.Nine items with factor loadings of less than .5 and 3 items loading on the"wrong" factor were dropped from the two subscales, resulting in 7 Causeitems and 10 Solution items (see Table 1 for factor loadings). The correlationbetween the Cause and Solution subscales was .64.

The final 17-item instrument, hereafter referred to as the Religious Attribu­tions of Responsibility Scale (RARS) yielded internal consistencies of .96 forboth the Cause and Solution subscales and test-retest reliabilities ranging from.82 to .95 (see Table 2). The internal consistency for the RARS as a whole alsowas .96. To obtain evidence of concurrent validity for the Cause subscale,correlations were computed between the Cause score and Pargament andHahn's (1986)one-item measures of causal attributions to God's will or pur­pose (r =.24),God's love or reward (r =.66), and God's anger or punishment(r = .44); all correlations were Significant atp < .01 (n = 252).

For descriptive purposes, we classified respondents' average scores on boththe Cause and Solution subscales as high or low using the midpoint of 4 onthe 7-point Likert scale as a cutoff. The largest percentage of respondents (39%)attributed high responsibility to God for both problem cause and solution ("Godas omniscient" model); 30%attributed low responsibility to God for both prob­lem cause and solution ("God as observer"); 27% attributed low responsibil­ity to God for problem cause but high responsibility to God for problem solution("God as savior"); 3% attributed high responsibility to God for problem causeand low responsibility to God for problem solution ("God as creator").

Confirmatory Factor Analysis

To obtain further information regarding the factor structure of the RARS,weconducted a confirmatory factor analysis. Using the same procedure employedfor the exploratory factor analysis, we gathered data from 179 undergraduateand graduate students from counselor education courses at Pennsylvania StateUniversity. Students were given extra course credit to participate in the study.

Counseling and Values / October 1998/ Vol. 43 57

TABLE 1

Factor Loadings From Exploratory Factor Analysis

Factor

Factor1-50lutionGod took care of me during this event.God provided me with strength around the event.God provided me with guidance for this event.I relied on God to overcome this event.God's love represents a solution to this event.God can affect my recovery from this event.God provided an answer to the event.God has a resolution for the event.God has a solution for the event.God provides a model to follow in regards to this event.

Factor2-GauseGod caused this event.God was responsible for the event.God meant for the event to happen.God causes all things, including this event.I credit God for this event.God has a reason for causing the event.God had control of whether or not the event occurred.

Factor 1

.97

.93

.91

.86

.83

.83

.80

.72

.71

.63

-.11-.11-.02.11.21.08.24

Factor 2

-.10-.12-.07-.01.06.04.06.15.15.19

.97

.96

.91

.77

.77

.72

.67

Of the participants who reported their gender, 145 (81%)were women and 33(18%) were men. The ethnic composition of the sample was 164 (92%) Euro­pean Americans, 8 (4%) African Americans, 2 (1%) Asian Americans, 1 (1%)Native American, and 4 (2%) individuals who did not identify their ethnicity.The average age of the sample was 23.5 years.

Data for the confirmatory factor analysis were analyzed using EQS (Bentler,1995). Table 3 indicates the degree to which the data fit the proposed two­factor model, a null model, and a one-factor model. The null (or independence)model "is one in which no relations among variables are specified" (Hoyle,1995, P: 7). The null model provides "a good baseline model against which

TABLE 2

Test-Retest Reliabillties

Subscale Test-Retest Interval r n

Solution 1 week .95 322 week .92 533 week .92 674 week .94 32

Cause 1 week .82 322 week .90 543 week .88 654 week .86 33

58 Counseling and Values / October 1998 / Vol. 43

TABLE 3

Goodness-of-Fit and Parsimony Indexes From ConfirmatoryFactor Analysis

Model

Null1 factor2 factor

ChI-Square

3341914441

df

136119118

CFI

.75

.90

AIC

3070676205

Note. CFI = Comparative Fit Index; AIC = Akaike's (1987) information criterion.

other models can be evaluated for the gain in explanation that they achieve"(Bentler, 1995, p. 92). In addition to the null model, a one-factor model wastested because the internal consistency of the RARS as a whole was extremelyhigh (a = .96), raising the possibility that the RARS is unidimensional ratherthan two-dimensional.

Models were evaluated on three bases. First, a chi-square statistic was cal­culated to test how well the data fit the various models. Table 3 reflects thefact that the chi-square value for the two-factor model represents a significantimprovement in model fit compared with the null and one-factor models. Be­cause problems exist with the chi-square measure of model fit (Hu & Bentler,1995), the one-factor and two-factor models were also evaluated on the basisof how well they fit the data using a comparative factor index (CFI), as recom­mended by Bentler (1990, 1995).

The CFI was selected because it accounts well for sample size among thevarious goodness-of-fit indexes commonly used. A CFI value of .90 is consid­ered to indicate an acceptable fit between data and a model (Bentler, 1995;Byrne, 1994).When the observed variables in an a priori model are items (ver­sus clusters of items), however, one might expect lower CFI values because ofthe number of influences on item scores other than the hypothesized underly­ing factors (P. M. Bentler, personal communication, April 7, 1997). Thus, theCFI of .90obtained in this study reflects a more than adequate fit between thedata and the two-factor model. Furthermore, the CFI of .75 for the one-factormodel reveals a lack of fit between the data and this model.

Finally, models were evaluated on the basis of parsimony, using Akaike's(1987)information criterion (AlC). The AIC statistic reflects parsimony in thatit accounts for the number of parameters that need to be estimated to achievea given degree of model fit. Consistent with the law of parsimony, whichmaintains that, all else being equal, one should choose the simplest explana­tion or solution to a problem, smaller values of AIC are preferable to largervalues (i.e., the fewer parameters that need to be estimated to achieve modelfit, the better; see Mulaik et al., 1989). As reflected in Table 3, the two-factormodel was more parsimonious than both the null and one-factor models.

Counseling and Values / October 1998/ Vol. 43 59

DISCUSSION

One of our overriding critiques of the existing literature on religious attribu­tions is that the field lacks instruments with sound psychometric properties.In addition, researchers seem to confuse or selectively attend to only one ofthe two dimensions of problem cause and solution. Consequently, we soughtto develop a measure of religious attributions about problem cause and solu­tion. The results of an exploratory factor analysis yielded two factors that wereconsistent with the constructs we intended to measure. Factor loadings werehigh for the final 17 items, as were statistics reflecting internal consistency,test-retest reliability, and association with existing one-item measures of causalattributions to God. In addition, findings from a confirmatory factor analysisprovided evidence supporting the factor structure of the RARS and, thus itsconstruct validity. Nonetheless, further studies remain to bedone to strengthenevidence for the construct validity of the instrument, especially for the Solu­tion subscale.

As part of the construct validation process, future research could profitablyexamine religious attributions of responsibility (a) as a criterion variable, todetermine the types of events (e.g., crises) or people (e.g., intrinsically religious)with which religious attributions of responsibility are associated; or (b) as apredictor variable, to ascertain what effects (e.g., on mental health) are relatedto religious attributions of responsibility. In particular, we think it would bevaluable to test Spilka's (1989) assertion that religious attributions help pro­vide meaning, control, and self-esteem in individuals' lives. Furthermore, werecommend the development and testing of causal models involving religiousattributions so that the relationships among variables might be ascertainedholistically rather than in piecemeal fashion.

The results of the current study are limited by our reliance upon a conve­nience sample of university students. Further instrument validation is requiredwith more diverse samples, such as older church or synagogue members. Inaddition, although participants made attributions about real personal eventsrather than contrived situations portrayed in vignettes, we do not know howindividuals' attributions may have been affected differentially by the amountof time elapsed since the event in question.

In reviewing research on the psychology of religion, Gorsuch (1988) noted,"Attribution research has been suggested as a major direction for movementin the psychology of religion" (p. 217). We hope that our review of empiricalliterature and development of a psychometrically sound instrument mightstimulate others to contribute to the development of knowledge in this area ofthe psychology of religion.

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