Intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness: Review and meta-analysis.

Abstract

Michael J. DonahueBrigham Young UniversityThe major findings of this meta-analytic review concerning intrinsic and extrinsicreligiousness are these: (a) Samples consisting of respondents with conservativetheological orientations seem more likely to display a negative correlation betweenintrinsic and extrinsic religiousness than do others, (b) Extrinsic religiousnesstends to be positively correlated with negatively evaluated characteristics, anduncorrelated with measures of religious belief and commitment, (c) Intrinsicreligiousness tends to be uncorrelated with negatively evaluated characteristics,and positively correlated with measures of religiousness, (d) A fourfold typologybased on median splits of the two scales is of little use when the dependentvariable is religious in nature, but with various nonreligious variables producesresults that may correspond to findings of curvilinearity observed with othermeasures of religiousness. Recommendations concerning the use of the intrinsicand extrinsic scales in future research are made. The article concludes with areview of recent conceptual developments by Batson (1976) and Hood (1978).No approach to religiousness has hadgreater impact on the empirical psychologyof religion than Gordon W. Allport's conceptsof intrinsic (7) and extrinsic (E) religiousness(Meadow & Kahoe, 1984).' Nearly 70 pub-lished studies have used Allport's ReligiousOrientation Scale (ROS), making it one ofthe most frequently used measures of reli-giousness.Research concerning / and E has beenreviewed in three current psychology-of-reli-gion textbooks (Batson & Ventis, 1982;Meadow & Kahoe, 1984; Paloutzian, 1983).Although these reviews are useful, they havenot closely examined a number of relevantissues, such as the I-E correlation and theI-E interaction. In addition to addressingthese issues, in the present review I seek toapply the techniques of meta-analysis (Glass,