Relationships with God among Young Adults: Validating a Measurement Model with Four Dimensions

Experiencing a relationship with God is widely acknowledged as an important aspect of personal religiosity for both affiliated and unaffiliated young adults, but surprisingly few attempts have been made to develop measures appropriate to its latent, multidimensional quality. This paper presents a new model for measuring relationships with God based on religious role theory, attachment to God theory, and insights from interview-based studies, which allows for a wider array of dimensions than have been considered in prior work: anger, anxiety, intimacy, and consistency. To test our model’s internal validity, we use confirmatory factor analysis with nationally representative data. To test its external validity, we (1) use difference-in-means tests across gender, race/ethnicity, geographical region, and religious affiliation; and (2) analyze correlations between our four new dimensions and four other commonly used measures of religiosity, thereby demonstrating both our model’s validity and value for future studies of personal religiosity.