Religiosity is an important variable in health research, given its known association with the health-disease process and important questions about the well-being, attitudes, practices and satisfaction with care and services. However, in the research in Public Health, it is often used religious affiliation as the only dimension of religiosity. This study aims to investigate the appropriateness of using the Duke Religious Index scale (DUREL) in the context of the Public Health research, evaluating the psychometric capabilities of the instrument when applied to a representative sample of users of primary care services to health in a medium-sized city of the interior of São Paulo State, Southeast Brazil. It was found an adequate internal consistency for the instrument and satisfactory convergent-discriminant validity. The results suggest that the use of DUREL is not restricted to research in mental health, and that its use can bring new perspectives for the understanding of events of interest in the field of Public Health.
religion and medicine; questionnaires; validation studies