Testing the Allportian religious orientation schema on Slovenian Catholics by multidimensional scaling

The dimensionality of religious orientation (RO), according to the Gorsuch and McPherson instrument (1989) was tested on a sample of Slovenian Catholic religious subjects (n = 297). RO – the “dominant paradigm” in the study of religious sentiment (Hill & Hood, 1999, p. 119) – was chosen since it has not been previously tested in this environment. Findings from reliability analysis, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses suggested that extrinsic other (EO) items should be observed as a separate scale. Results also indicated an overlap between the extrinsic personal (EP) and intrinsic (I) dimensions, and that E bifurcated further. More specifically, MDS analyses indicated a clear pattern of grouping of the I, EP, extrinsic social (ES) and EO items clusters, where each one populated one of the quadrants in two-dimensional space, suggesting that the axes could be meaningfully labeled as “personal-social” orientation and “central-peripheral” status of religious sentiment, respectively. Thus, the instrumental dimension of religious motivation in this specific religious environment seemed to be linked to a peripheral nature of one’s religious sentiment. Consequently, the peripheral space could be seen as a religious sentiment, but one that is limited, not interfering into other areas of life, but remaining compartmentalized.