The Intrinsic Spirituality Scale: A New Six-Item Instrument for Assessing the Salience of Spirituality as a Motivational Construct

One facet of the growing interest in spirituality and religion has been the tendency to conceptualize spirituality and religion as distinct, but overlapping, constructs. While this recent distinction has lead to the creation of new spirituality measures, many of these instruments can be faulted on two grounds: they use terms.(e.g., God) that limit their validity with non-theistic populations, and they fail to build upon pre-existing scientific work. To address these two concerns, this paper modifies the most prominent instrument in the field of the psychology of religion, Allport and Ross' (1967) measure of intrinsic religion, to tap spirituality. The modified six-item intrinsic spirituality scale assesses the degree to which spirituality functions as an individual's master motive, for both theistic and non-theistic populations, both within and outside of religious frameworks.