Construction and Evaluation of the Faith-Based Social Engagement Scale among Emerging Croatian Adults

Abstract

Globally, religious institutions and faith-based civic associations are encouraging believers, particularly young people, to actively engage in advocating and defending religious values. While in Croatia religious social engagement is being promoted and practiced for decades, this form of religiosity remained unexplored. To facilitate research in the prevalence, background, types, and outcomes of such collective activity, this paper presents the construction and evaluation of a faith-based social engagement scale. Based on qualitative work, 16 items indicating four dimensions of faith-based engagement (humanitarian, evangelical, civic, and political) were confirmatory factor analyzed in a probability sample of emerging adults, aged 18–25 years (N = 522), from a commercial online panel. The scale’s validity was confirmed by associations with other measures of religiosity and religiosity-related attitudes and values. In addition to satisfactory criterion, construct, and discriminative validity, the scale was gender-invariant and had high internal consistency. In conclusion, we briefly discuss limitations and a range of potential applications of this new measure.