The Religious Behavioral Identification Form (RBIF): A Scale to Measure Global Versus Situational Understanding of Religious Actions

The religion and health relationship is theorized to emerge, in part, due to religion equipping people with a uniquely potent source of meaning that can be used to aid cognitive appraisal following stressful life events. Cognitively, this process is thought to involve the reintegration of fragmented, situation-oriented thoughts into more coherent, globally meaningful mental representations. Although some tentative evidence (Ford, 1986; Harman, 1976) supports this idea, studies have yet to fully identify whether people who are more religious or whether exposure to religious stimuli evoke a more global thinking pattern. One reason for this is that there are not yet adequate measures to assess people's tendency to frame religion in terms of situational versus global representations. The present study addresses this measurement issue by applying ideas from action identification theory to justify and develop the Religious Behavioral Identification Form (RBIF), a new 15-item scale that measures the tendency to understand religious behaviors in terms of situational, lower level versus global, higher level action identities. The scale exhibits good psychometric properties from an initial validation and offers a new way to empirically test important theories in the psychology of religion. The article concludes by highlighting some novel ideas for research that could utilize the scale to test influential theoretical ideas.