Attachment to God: An attempt to build an explicit measure instrument

Starting from the attachment relationship to God question by Kirkpatrick & Shaver (1992) we attempted to build a self-report inventory to measure it. In the first step, we proposed three different descriptions of attachment patterns to our participants, asking them to image a person who might image or think to God in that way and then to describe this person in terms of self-description, religious belief and prac-tices, charity work and social behaviour. From these descriptions we extracted only sentences associated to a specific typology (secure, avoidant, ambivalent) and we used them to arrange an inventory (seven points rank) subdivided in three areas: self description, religiosity, social behaviour. A set of several instruments were then used with 212 participants balanced by gender and age: the Italian adaptation of Gorsuch and McPherson’s (1989) Religious Orientation Scale to measure intrinsic, personal extrinsic and social extrinsic religiosity, Quest Scale developed by Batson and Schoenrade (1991) to measure quest religion orientation, Attachment Style Questionnaire by Feeney, Noller and Hanrahan (1994) to measure adult attachment, Kirkpatrick and Shaver (1992) attachment relationship to God, together with socio-demographic questions about religious belief and practices and political orientation (Jennings & Van Deth 1989) and the inventory derived from Kirkpatrick typology. A factor analysis (maximum likelihood and Varimax rotation) on the inventory that we built, carried out latent variable on each of three areas: insecure self, open to other self, opportunist self and opportunist religiosity, religious practises, disposable to others, auto-self closure and a factor very similar to the construct of intrinsic religiosity (Allport). All factors were coherently and statistically different by Kirkpatrick’s attachment relationship to God typology. Our latent variable presented some inter-correlations: secure-self correlated positively with disposable to others and negatively with auto-self closure. There were several correlations between religiosity (quest and intrinsic) with our religiosity factors: quest negatively correlates with intrinsic/extrinsic orientation and with our intrinsic factor and our intrinsic factor positively correlates with intrinsic orientation.