Congruence Coefficient Calculator

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The congruence coefficient is a statistical estimate of the similarity of two factors' loadings. Paste the loadings for two factors to be compared into the columns provided, and my spreadsheet will calculate the congruence coefficient for you!

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Variable loadings <- Unhide to view calculations Summed products of loadings divided by square root of p
Factor a Factor b #DIV/0! = Congruence Coefficient!
Paste loadings below
rcongruence = ( ∑ ab) / (( ∑ a² )( ∑ b
where a & b = loadings of given variable on factors to be com

divided by square root of product of sums of squared loadings

b) / (( ∑ a² )( ∑ b² ))½
variable on factors to be compared

Questions? Send an email to NStau001@ucr.edu!

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Religious and spiritual struggles arise in various forms and circumstances. The newly developed Religious and Spiritual Struggles (RSS) scale reveals a coherent, multidimensional structure in these domain-specific problems that applies to religious and nonreligious people alike. Thus new questions emerge. Do religious people struggle less with religion, or more? Struggles and stress seem likely to coincide, but might stressful life events give rise to fewer religious struggles among religious people? We tested this moderation hypothesis in a large sample of American undergraduates, who completed the RSS and measures of stressful life events, religious belief salience, and religious participation. Latent interaction factors for religiousness and stressful life events failed to predict additional variance in most RSS factors in a structural equation model using polychoric correlations, yielding no support for the moderation hypothesis. However, religiousness and stressful life events independently predicted higher scores on most factors of the RSS in most samples.

Stressful life events and religiousness predict struggles about religion and ...

Nick Stauner

(2015, January). Data blitz presented at the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality preconference of the 17th annual convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Diego, CA. The Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale (RSS) measures an important set of psychological constructs in an underemphasized section of the overlap between religion and well-being. The RSS assesses six domains of religious and spiritual struggle: divine, demonic, interpersonal, moral, doubt, and ultimate meaning. A previous confirmatory factor analysis of a moderately sized sample found good fit for the intended measurement model with six first-order factors. We replicated this model across five large adult samples from the USA (total N = 5,617). Next, we fit a restricted bifactor model to test whether a single general factor of religious/spiritual struggle could explain these factors’ correlations with each other, religiousness, or negative emotionality. This model’s balanced loadings supported the mutual viability of multidimensional and unidimensional scoring systems for the RSS. Additionally, we explored a bifactor model with correlated group factors that improved fit statistics. This model maintained the correlations among the original six factors while extracting an ambiguous general factor from the RSS. This general factor’s strong correlations with religious participation and belief salience suggested that it represents religiousness itself. Allowing religious items to load on the RSS’ general factor verified this. It also permitted estimation of a second general factor from all RSS items. This second general factor of spiritual struggle correlated fairly strongly with a common factor of neuroticism, depression, anxiety, and stress. The negative emotionality factor also correlated with most of this model’s independent group factors that correspond to the original dimensions of the RSS, especially Ultimate Meaning struggle. These analyses demonstrate both the discriminant validity of the six domains of religious/spiritual struggles and the complexity of their relationships with religiousness and negative emotionality. As an ancillary purpose of these analyses, we review, demonstrate, and advocate modern categorical structural equation modeling techniques throughout this project.

Distinguishing religious and spiritual struggles from religiousness and negat...

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(2016, January). Poster presented at the 17th convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Diego, CA. Searching for meaning in life has been conceptualized as a fundamental human motivation that plays an integral role in mature development. Yet most empirical research on search for meaning has revealed it to be associated with a poorer profile of psychological health. We examined how searching for meaning relates to a broad range of indicators of psychological adjustment in 7 large‐scales studies (total N = 10,067). We found the traditional associations between search for meaning and indicators of negative emotional health (e.g., depression, anxiety, stress), but we also discovered evidence for more nuanced relations between search for meaning with personality and mental health variables. Specifically, among people reporting high levels of presence of meaning in life, search for meaning was conducive to well being. Additionally, although search was related to religious and spiritual struggle, it was also associated with a more engaged approach to resolving those struggles.

Search for meaning in life: Evidence for nuanced associations with psychologi...

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(2015, August). Poster presented at the convention of the American Psychological Association, Toronto, Ontario. The sense that life is meaningful is known to relate positively to common religious and spiritual beliefs, traits, and behaviors within the North American population. Examples of such constructs that correlate with meaning in life include belief in an afterlife, intrinsic religiousness, and religious reading, meditation, or service attendance. Meaning in life may also mediate relationships between religion or spirituality and subjective well-being. This underscores the importance of the role meaning in life plays in the junction of positive psychology and spirituality. To enrich our understanding of how meaning in life connects with religion and spirituality, this study explored bivariate relationships between meaning in life and a variety of personality constructs pertaining to God, religious organizations, and spiritual issues. Our method was to estimate factor correlations from structural equation models, using polychoric correlations to accommodate Likert scale measurement in a large undergraduate sample from the USA. In terms of beliefs about God, meaning in life correlated positively with beliefs that God exists, that one can relate to God in a personal, comprehensible, and desirable way, that God is available and warm in temperament, and that God intervenes actively in the world. Meaning in life also correlated positively with desire to believe in God and certainty of beliefs about God, and negatively with doubts about God’s existence and perceived conflicts with God. Regarding attitudes toward organized religion, meaning in life correlated positively with positivity toward religion, close involvement with a spiritual group, socially supportive responses to religious/spiritual struggles, and fundamentalism, and correlated negatively with personal disengagement from one’s religion, conflicts with religion, extrinsic social motivation for religious attendance, and social invalidation of religious/spiritual struggles. Results concerning religious/spiritual orientation included positive correlations between meaning in life and religious belief salience, self-perceived clarity of religious views, openness to doubt and other viewpoints about one’s faith, and religious exploration. Negative correlations manifested between meaning in life and experiences of religious and spiritual struggle, avoidance of religious questions, self-perceived complexity of religious views and difficulty of religious questions, religious quest orientation, and belief that all world religions are equally valid. Concerning the spiritual issue of suffering, meaning in life correlated positively with beliefs that God shares in human suffering, that suffering is part of God’s plan, that God is experienced through suffering but transcends it, and that suffering promotes spiritual growth. Meaning in life related negatively to beliefs that...

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(2015, October). Symposium presented at the convention of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Newport Beach, CA. Recently, research linking religion and spirituality to well-being has extended beyond the supportive roles of religion to examine struggles that people experience in religious and spiritual domains of life. People struggle with many issues in religion and spirituality, including relational challenges with divine beings and religious people or organizations, demonic influences, and personal difficulties with morality, religious and spiritual doubt, and ultimate meaning. A new measure, the Religious and Spiritual Struggles (RSS) scale, has demonstrated construct validity in men and women, and people who consider themselves religious, spiritual, both, or neither, regardless of belief in a divine being or religious affiliation. However, frequencies of struggles differ across these groups. To further study demographic variations in struggles, we sampled 19,726 adult participants from throughout the USA and across a wide range of ages and religious affiliations. Single-item measures of the six RSS domains measured struggles in this sample. Exploratory analyses revealed a broad array of complex effects from all demographic factors considered, including age, gender, sexual orientation, region of the USA, religious affiliation, and some interactions among these factors. For example, men reported more of all struggles than women, but this difference only appeared clear among young adult heterosexuals. A subsample of 4,054 participants who reported at least one moderate struggle also exhibited group differences by ethnicity and education. For example, religious and spiritual struggle appeared to increase with higher education, especially at the highest levels of education, but only among Latino and European American participants. These results imply that demographic factors influence religious and spiritual struggles. These effects may differentiate these demographic groups greatly enough to necessitate their independent study. In the future, we encourage researchers to examine the replicability of these group differences, and to always exercise caution when generalizing theoretical conclusions about religion and spirituality across demographic groups.

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(2015, May). Poster presented at the convention of the Association for Psychological Science, New York, NY, and at Case Western Reserve University’s Research ShowCASE, Cleveland, OH. Religious and spiritual (r/s) struggles arise in many forms and circumstances. The newly developed Religious and Spiritual Struggles (RSS) scale exhibits a coherent, multidimensional structure in these domain-specific problems. It applies to religious and nonreligious people alike. This gives rise to new questions about the nature of r/s struggle. Do religious people struggle less with religion, or more? R/s struggles and overall stress seem likely to correlate, but might they correlate less among more religious people? We tested this moderation hypothesis in a large sample of American undergraduates, who completed the RSS, the Perceived Stress Scale, and measures of religious belief salience and religious participation. A hierarchical regression of factor scores based on a structural equation model of polychoric correlations found positive relationships between stress and all subscales of the RSS. Religiousness also predicted greater demonic, interpersonal, and moral struggle, and predicted less struggle with doubt and ultimate meaning, but did not contribute to prediction of divine struggles or overall struggles independently of stress. No significant interactions manifested between perceived stress and religiousness. This suggests the relationship between recent stress and r/s struggles does not change with religiousness. Overall, r/s struggle may have more to do with stress than religion, as predictive relationships with religiousness only exceeded relationships with stress in the cases of demonic and ultimate meaning struggles. Furthermore, relationships between r/s struggle and stress generally appeared stronger for negatively worded items than for positively worded items on the Perceived Stress Scale. To improve the fit of its measurement model, the positive factor explained covariance among items expressing confidence and control, while the negative factor determined frequency of overwhelmed and dysphoric feelings. These factors correlated fairly strongly, doubled the adjusted R² when entered as independent predictors rather than a single composite, and revealed differences in their relationships with r/s struggles across the RSS subscales. Most notably, the negative factor of the Perceived Stress Scale predicted all struggles better than the positive factor except Demonic struggle. The positive factor achieved predictive significance for all struggles except r/s doubt. This upholds the value of letting stress and resilience vary independently.

Religious and spiritual struggles, perceived stress, and religiousness

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(2015, June). Poster presented at the 4th convention of the Association for Research in Personality, St. Louis, MO. Religious and spiritual struggles arise in various forms and circumstances. The newly developed Religious and Spiritual Struggles (RSS) scale reveals a coherent, multidimensional structure in these domain-specific problems that applies to religious and nonreligious people alike. Thus new questions emerge. Do religious people struggle less with religion, or more? Struggles and stress seem likely to coincide, but might stress give rise to fewer religious struggles among religious people? We tested this moderation hypothesis in a large sample of American undergraduates, who completed the RSS and measures of stressful life events, religious belief salience, and religious participation. A hierarchical regression of factor scores based on a structural equation model of polychoric correlations found support for the hypothesis. Religion and stress related positively to all subscales of the RSS and their overall mean, but a small, negative interaction also manifested, which suggested a weakening relationship between struggles and stress as religiousness increases.

Religious and spiritual struggles in relation to stress and religiousness

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(2015, March/August). Presented at the Midyear Research Conference on Religion and Spirituality, Provo, Utah / the convention of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion, Istanbul, Turkey. Abstract: Religion and well-being are known to correlate positively in the North American population. Building partly on this premise, recent research has explored the common ground shared by these broad constructs. This work has introduced new hybrid constructs that describe individual differences in, e.g., the quality of relationships with one’s God or religious community, the degree of doubt felt about religious beliefs, or the sense of spiritual transcendence. Meanwhile, the USA’s religiously unaffiliated minority population has grown in size and proportion. To what extent can explicitly religious or spiritual forms of well-being coherently describe people who do not consider themselves religious nor spiritual? Our study focused specifically on a new, multidimensional measure, the Religious and Spiritual Struggles (RSS) scale, which assesses six correlated types of struggle: Divine, Demonic, Interpersonal, Moral, Ultimate Meaning, and Doubt. We measured these struggles, life satisfaction, meaning in life, and the search for meaning in a large sample of American undergraduates. Each participant self-identified as “religious but not spiritual”, “spiritual but not religious”, both, or neither. The RSS achieved strict measurement invariance across these groups, which strongly supports its construct validity regardless of religiousness, spirituality, or the absence of either or both. Group means for all latent factors differed, but in unexpected ways. Spiritual but not religious participants reported the least spiritual struggles of all kinds except Ultimate Meaning. Means for participants who identified as both religious and spiritual did not differ significantly from means for participants who identified as neither religious nor spiritual, despite these groups’ ostensibly opposite perspectives on religion and spirituality. However, these groups contrasted most sharply in terms of how religious and spiritual struggles related to external variables, especially meaning in life, which related more weakly within the nonreligious, nonspiritual group. Religiousness and spirituality independently moderated relationships between well-being and these domain-specific struggles.

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Nick Stauner

(2015, March). Presented at the Midyear Research Conference on Religion and Spirituality, Provo, Utah. Abstract: Religiousness is known to relate positively to well-being and meaning in life within the North American population. Evidence suggests complexities in these relationships; for example, meaning may mediate the relationship between well-being and religiousness. Other religious constructs have attracted empirical research recently, including religious doubt and conflict with God. The Religious & Spiritual Struggles (RSS) Scale measures six such forms of religious and spiritual struggle, including divine, demonic, moral, interpersonal, ultimate meaning, and doubt struggles. To what extent do these various religious constructs uniquely predict cognitive well-being? Does their emphasis on spiritual and religious problems differentiate them from religiousness per se? Do predictive relationships support theories that distinguish meaning from life satisfaction as separate correlates of religiousness? To investigate, we fit a structural equation model to responses from a sample of 2,611 undergraduates from the USA. This model predicted meaning in life and life satisfaction separately from eight religious constructs, including the six forms of spiritual struggle, religious belief salience, and religious participation. Results demonstrated the importance of measuring each construct independently, as some but not all struggles predicted unique variance in meaning and well-being when controlling for religious belief salience and participation. This establishes the incremental value of involving spiritual and religious struggles in predictive models of well-being based on religious traits. Patterns of regression coefficients differed when predicting meaning in life versus life satisfaction, and model fit worsened when constraining paths to be equal for life satisfaction and meaning in life. This supports the discriminant validity of these strongly related yet distinct aspects of cognitive well-being. The different lists of independent predictors for these well-being constructs may help elucidate their complex connections with religion and spirituality.

Predicting life meaning and satisfaction with religious & spiritual struggles

Nick Stauner

(2015, February). Poster presented at the Psychology of Religion & Spirituality Preconference for the 16th convention of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, Long Beach, CA. Abstract: A growing subdomain of psychological research on religion and spirituality examines the causes, consequences, and subjective experience of religious or spiritual struggle. To advance the psychological community’s understanding of religious and spiritual struggles through quantitative empirical research, Exline and colleagues recently developed a modern, multidimensional measure with excellent psychometric qualities, the Religious and Spiritual Struggles (RSS) Scale. This measure includes six correlated but unidimensional subscales pertaining specifically to divine, demonic, interpersonal, moral, ultimate meaning, and doubt struggles. Though a first-order model of these six correlated latent factors fits well in confirmatory factor analysis, this model leaves a little room for improvement. The size of the first eigenvalue suggests a possible bifactor structure, in which all items load together on a general factor as well as on their separate subscale factors. Bifactor analysis also offers information about the validity of unidimensional and multidimensional scoring systems, both of which the RSS facilitates. Using a sample of 2,702 undergraduates from the USA, a confirmatory bifactor analysis of the RSS revealed strong loadings on the general factor for most items and moderate-to-strong loadings on group factors, essentially supporting the comparable validity of both scoring methods. Though this restricted bifactor model worsened model fit very slightly, an alternate bifactor model that allowed group factors to correlate freely offered a small improvement in model fit over the conventional model of six correlated factors. Furthermore, structural equation models that included measures of religious belief salience and religious participation demonstrated strong, positive correlations between these constructs and the general RSS factor. In the conventional six-factor RSS model, religiousness correlates mostly with demonic, moral, and ultimate meaning struggles. Including the general factor in the RSS measurement model improved the independence of the subscale factors from religious belief salience and religious participation, effectively serving to control the RSS subscales’ shared covariance with religiousness. Future use of the RSS in the context of latent factor models may benefit from use of this bifactor measurement model with correlated group factors. It improves model fit, reduces subscale correlations with religiousness, and produces a psychometrically promising general factor that represents the strong covariance between religiousness and decontextualized religious and spiritual struggles.

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WPA 2011 Poster - Joint Factors of Spirituality and Religiousness

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Stauner, N., Selvam, T., Cheong, R., & Ozer, D. J. (2011). Religious differences in the value systems of meaningful (and meaningless) lives. Poster presented at the 2nd convention of the Association for Research in Personality, Riverside, CA. Abstract: Religiousness correlates positively with self-rated meaning in life. Baumeister (1991) claims that because religions provide value systems, people without religion suffer more meaninglessness due to a "value gap." Do people of different religions organize their values differently? Does meaning in life associate with the same values across religions? Meaning correlates with religious values most strongly and positively (Stauner & Ozer, 2010). Is this true among non-religious people? To address such questions, 149 Riverside undergraduates were administered the Meaning in Life Questionnaire and Values Q-Set. Religious participants reported more meaning in life than non-religious participants. Christians valued pleasure less than non-religious participants; otherwise only religious values differed in importance across religions. Meanwhile, differences among religions in the relationships between values and meaning proved more nuanced. Valuing religious observation was more positively related to meaning in life among Christians than non-religious participants, but no differences emerged regarding religious exploration. The negative correlation between meaning and the value of pleasure was also stronger among Christians. Exclusively among participants of other religions, valuing personal skill more and health less was related to higher meaning in life. These results may reflect hidden consequences for existential self-evaluation beneath the apparent invariance of values across religious affiliations.

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