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Properties of the Duke Religious Index in a sample of postgraduate students

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

IDepartamento de Medicina Social, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto, Universidade de São Paulo (FMRP-USP), Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brasil

IIFundação Hemocentro, USP, Batatais, SP, Brasil

Address correspondence to

Dear Editor,

Several studies have shown an association between religiousness and different aspects of physical or mental health1, and this makes important the articles as the one published by Taunay et al.2, which aimed to study the psychometric properties of the Brazilian version of the Duke Religious Index (P-DUREL) in psychiatric and university student samples. The instrument showed adequate internal consistency and test-retest reliability in both samples2. We wish to add that using data from a study conducted by our group (not yet published) about the associations between religiousness and attitudes towards blood donation among postgraduate students of courses in the health area, we found a Cronbach's alpha of 0.88 for the P-DUREL and 0.89 for the intrinsic religiosity (IR) scale in a sample of 160 individuals. We found Spearman correlation coefficients between the domains of organizational (OR) and non-organizational (NOR) religiosi­ty of 0.58, between the domains of IR and OR 0.58, and between NOR and IR of 0.62 (all p-values less than 0.01). These results are similar to those of Taunay et al.2, suggesting that the psychometric properties of P-DUREL are also satisfactory for this specific group. In addition, a single factor with eigenvalue equal to 3.5 was retained in an exploratory factor analysis (principal components), expla­ining 70.2% of the variance. The KMO (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin) index of sample adequacy was 0.85, suggesting the adequacy of the factor analysis. These results are similar to those obtained by Storch et al.3 considering the English version of the instrument. In our data, we not found significant correlation between the age of the subjects and the OR, NOR and IR scores. We found positive Spearman correlations between the P-DUREL scores and the two subscales of the Spiritual Well-Being (SWB) questionnaire of Paloutzian and Ellison4 [OR and Religious Well-Being (RWB), r = 0.51; OR and Existential Well-Being (EWB), r = 0.23; NOR and RWB, r = 0.65; NOR and EWB, r = 0.26; IR and RWB, r = 0.77, IR and EWB, r = 0.43, all p-values less than 0.01]. We observed that women tend to have higher scores in all three domains of P-DUREL than males (Wilcoxon test, p-values less than 0.01, result already showed by Lucchetti et al.5). Although in our sample the Evangelical and Protestant respondents have shown higher mean scores for the three domains (17.2 for the IR, 4.9 for the OR and 4.3 for the NOR; compared with means of 15.4 for the IR, 4.0 for the OR and 4.4 for the NOR when considered the Catholic respondents, and 15.7 for the IR, 4.0 for the OR and 4.2 for the NOR when considered the Spiritist respondents), we have no evidence of a ceiling effect for the scales. These findings support the psychometric properties of the scale P-DUREL, indicating their applicability in health studies.

References

  • 1. Faria JB, Seidl EMF. Religiosidade e enfrentamento em contextos de saúde e doença: revisão da literatura. Psicol Reflex Crit. 2005;18(3):381-9.
  • 2. Taunay TCD, Gondim FAA, Macêdo DS, Moreira-Almeida A, Gurgel LA, Andrade LMS, et al. Validação da versão brasileira da escala de religiosidade de Duke (DUREL). Rev Psiq Clín. 2012;39(4):130-5.
  • 3. Storch EA, Roberti JW, Heidgerken AD, Storch JB, Lewin AB, Killiany EM, et al. The Duke Religion Index: a psychometric investigation. Pastoral Psychol. 2004;53(2):175-81.
  • 4. Paloutzian RF, Ellison CW. Loneliness, spiritual well-being and the quality of life. In: Peplau LA, Perlman D, editors. Loneliness, a sourcebook of current theory, research and therapy. Nova York: Wiley; 1982. p. 224-37.
  • 5. Lucchetti G, Granero Lucchetti AL, Peres MF, Leão FC, Moreira-Almeida A, Koenig HG. Validation of the Duke Religion Index: DUREL (Portuguese version). J Relig Health. 2012;51(2):579-86.
  • Properties of the Duke Religious Index in a sample of postgraduate students

    Edson Zangiacomi MartinezI; Rodrigo Guimarães dos Santos AlmeidaII; Antonio Carlos Duarte de CarvalhoI
  • Publication Dates

    • Publication in this collection
      14 Nov 2012
    • Date of issue
      2012
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