Structural modelling of the interrelationships between Christian faith, religious orientation and love styles

[摘要] English: This study was designed to investigate the relationship between Evangelical Christian faith and romanticlove. The investigation was done through the analysis, by means of structural equation modelling, of apriori models proposing various ways in which these variables could possibly be related.The literature review of this study revealed the necessity of delimiting studies in the field of religion tospecific and narrowly-defined religious groupings, and also provided a working and measurabledefinition of Evangelical Christian faith. Furthermore, psychological research into love, focusing on thatemanating from the work of Lee (1977), was reviewed. A clarification of the terms used by Lee and theiroriginal meanings, and how these terms relate to a Christian definition of love was provided.Three scales were used in this study. Data were collected from a sample of 369 young, unmarried, WhiteSouth African Evangelical Christians. Prior to the analysis of the latent variable models, thepsychometric suitability of the scales to be used was examined by means of reliability analyses andComprehensive Exploratory Factor Analyses (Tateneni, Mels, Cudeck & Browne, 2001). The ShepherdScale (Bassett et al., 1981) proved to be psychometrically inadequate, even after trimming the 38 itemsdown to 16. This study could not replicate factor structures found in the literature for this scale, and it isdoubtful whether the scale is a useful research tool. The Religious Orientation Scale (All port & Ross,1967) was trimmed so as to maximise its reliability and its convergent and discriminant validity, yieldinga shortened scale of seven items each for Intrinsic and Extrinsic. The Love Attitudes Scale (Hendrick &Hendrick, 1986) was also trimmed (from 42 to 24 items), and the shortened version agreed almostcompletely with a shortened version developed by Hendrick et al. (1998). The trimmed versions of allthree scales were cross-validated on a previous data set, with the Love Attitudes Scale performing best,and the Shepherd Scale not validating well at all.The a priori models tested did not deliver acceptable fit with the data. It was discovered that theShepherd Scale played a mediational role on the influence of Intrinsic and Extrinsic on the love styles ofAgape and Storge, and Ludus, respectively. These influences were incorporated into two further models,with the best model being that in which Intrinsic was posited as a cause of Relationship, which in turnfunctioned as a cause of both Agape and Storge. Extrinsic (correlated with Intrinsic) was also posited asa cause of Doctrine, which functioned as a cause of Ludus.Numerous equivalent models were considered, although the two models posited a posteriori werefavoured. In view of the poor structure of the Shepherd Scale, and because of the manner in which themediational effect of the Shepherd Scale variables was uncovered, these two models must be seen astentative, as their statistical selection may have been due to a capitalisation on chance.It ·is recommended that the study be repeated, testing the two a posteriori models on new (but similar)samples, and also on different cultural groupings, various very specifically defined and delimitedreligious groupings, age groupings, and love status groupings. It is also recommended that clinicians andcounsellors take cognisance of the relationship between faith and love amongst their Christian clients.

[发布机构] University of the Free State