Dimensions of Religiosity Reconsidered; Evidence from a Cross-Cultural Study

This paper supports the multidimensional conceptualization of religiosity by presenting empirical evidence for a strikingly similar dimensional pattern for a group of German and American students. An oblique factor analytic rotation solution identified six dimensions of religiosity: belief, experience, religious practice, religious knowledge, individual moral consequences, and social consequences. Factor intercorrelations show that for both Germans and Americans religious knowledge and social consequences appear to be unique dimensions that are essentially unrelated to the other dimensions investigated. The remaining dimensions—belief, experience, and religious practice, and to some extent the individual moral consequence dimension—while differentiated in the oblique rotation solution, also form a more generic dimension of religiosity when second-order factor analysis is applied. Our interpretation is that differing numbers of dimensions, and differing content in lower- and higher-order dimensions of religiosity are not logically inconsistent in that they are derived from variant orders of abstraction.