Religiosity and fundamentalism in their relation to some features of personality. A research on a Northern-Italian sample

Over the last few years many acts of violence, power abuse, and mutual intolerance between different religious denominations were witnessed. The background hypothesis, which was addressed in a previous analysis, is that fundamentalism (or extremism) is a general psychological dimension wich manifests itself at best in religious practices and beliefs. Attention has been focused on religious fundamentalism in the Italian world and on variables that could be connected to it, above all by attempting to translate and/or devise instruments to detect it. A set of four questionnaires and a series of socio-demographic variables such as age, gender, educational level, occupation and political orientation were used in this analysis. Altemeyer and Hunsberger’s (1992) Religious Fundamentalism Scale was used to measure religious fundamentalism, Gorsuch and McPherson’s (1989) Religious Orientation Scale to measure intrinsic, personal extrinsic and social extrinsic religiosity and Gough’s (1960) Adjective Check List (ACL) to detect psychological features of personality, by using a list of 300 adjectives. The aim of this specific investigation was to study the relationships between the variables measured by these instruments and political orientation and personality features, variables that are all somehow connected to religious orientations and fundamentalism. The main sample used in this research consisted of 490 participants. The data was collected from the cities of Northern Italy and their districts, trying to reflect the distribution of age, gender and place of residence (village, small town and city). Other sample (N=170) consisted of participants who were Jehovah’s Witnesses or members of Opus Dei and other catholic movements (Communion and Liberation, Focolare Movement, Rinnovamento nello Spirito Santo) in order to examine these forms of religiosity and their relation to personality features.