Summary of Findings:
Initial Development of the PSI Grace Scale
Timothy A. Sisemore, Melinda Killian, & Mahogany Swanson
Psychological Studies Institute
Questions or comments:
Demographics
219 subjects largely from 3 evangelical colleges in the Southeastern US, though several Ss from evangelical churches
Age:
90% between 18 and 25, only 1% over 40
Gender:
44% male; 56% female
Race:
84% Caucasian; 7% African-American; 3% Hispanic; 6% other
Christian tradition:
14% Evangelical; 21% Charismatic; 48% Protestant, 3% Catholic; 12% Unaffiliated
Subscales of the PSI Grace Scale
Responsible Grace
Knowing God will forgive lets me do anything I want. (-)
My behavior does not matter since I am forgiven. (-)
Because of God’s forgiveness, I am free to live my life as I please. (-)
I can sin knowing God has to forgive me if I ask. (-)
I can live life my way as long as I ask forgiveness before I die. (-)
Grace toward Self
I have trouble forgiving myself when I have done wrong. (-)
It is hard to forgive myself of the sin in my life even after giving it to God. (-)
I am afraid I am living out of God’s will for my life because of choices I made in the past. (-)
I accept my shortcomings. (+)
I continue to feel shame after confessing sin. (-)
I have difficulty accepting forgiveness from others. (-)
Grace toward Others
My beliefs about grace encourage me to be forgiving of others. (+)
I am able to forgive others when they hurt me. (+)
My acceptance of God’s grace has helped me love others more effectively. (+)
Because of grace bestowed to me, I am able to forgive others. (+)
Grace Independent of Works
God’s love for me is constant, no matter what I do. (+)
Those who sin less than others require less grace. (-)
I must work hard to experience God’s grace and forgiveness. (-)
The harder I work, the more I earn God’s favor. (-)
The more obedient I am, the more God’ loves me. (-)
Results
The items of the Grace Scale were analyzed and all but one sowed a positive item-to-total correlation with the exception of one. This item was removed resulting in a Cronbach’s Alpha of .87, which is quite satisfactory to show that the PSI Grace Scale is internally reliable.
Factor analysis was conducted, specifically a Principal Component Analysis with Varimax Rotation was performed, yielding 9 eigenvalues about a value of 1.0. A scree test narrowed this to four factors that explained a some 45% of the total variance. The strongest factor, accounting for 24% of the variance, was dubbed Responsible Grace as items focused on God’s act of forgiveness as not giving license to irresponsible behavior. Other factors, in order, include Grace toward Self (10.5%), Grace toward Others (5.3%) and Grace Independent of Works (4.8%). Correlations among the data are presented in Table 1. The four scores were highly correlated with each other, though the Grace toward Self measure was less so and did not show a significant relationship at all with the God’s Grace in Forgiveness factor. In brief, the Grace Scale demonstrated good internal reliability and yielded four meaningful factors.
A second goal of the study was to demonstrate external validity as the authors hypothesized that the Grace Scale would correlate positively with Healthy Views of Sin and Intrinsic Religiosity and negatively with Extrinsic Religiosity. The data, presented in Table 2, supported each of these hypotheses. This also held true for three of the four subscales, with Grace toward Self being the lone factor not demonstrating a relationship with the external measures.
The strongest relationship was that of the Grace Scale to the Intrinsic-Extrinsic measures, with Intrinsic faith being strongly correlated (.61) with positive views of Grace while Extrinsic faith had almost the exact Pearson r in the opposite direction (-.62). Grace appears to be associated with persons’ having sincere religious motivation and not seeing their faith more as a means to an end as extrinsics might.
The PSI Grace Scale also positively correlated with the four aspects of Healthy Beliefs about Sin that Watson et al. (2005) posit based on Cooper’s (2003) work, this holding true fairly consistently across the factors of Healthy Beliefs in Sin and across the Grace Scale factors, with the exception of Grace toward Self.
This initial data suggests the PSI Grace Scale to have satisfactory external validity in addition to internal reliability. Overall, the factors do not seem to add any additional information about the religious meaning of grace beyond what is suggested by the full Grace Scale.
Table 1
Correlations among and Internal Reliabilities for Measures of PSI Grace Scale (N=219)
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Measures1.2.3.4.
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1. Responsible Grace--.06.40**.39**
2. Grace toward Self-.15*.13*
3. Grace toward Others-.39**
4. Grace Independent of Works-
Scale Statistics
Internal Reliability ().83.75.83.72
______
* p < .05** p < .01
Table 2
Correlations of PSI Grace Scale and Subscales with Beliefs about Sin and with Intrinsic and Extrinsic Religious Orientations (N = 219)1
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MeasuresGRGGSGOGW
Self-Improvement.63.58**.45**.07.56**.39**
Perfection Avoidance.72.49**.31**.05.40**.46**
Healthy Humility.67.54**.44**-.09.57**.45**
Self-Reflective Functioning.74.60**.56**-.08.54**.49**
Intrinsic.84.61**.44**.08.59**.44**
Extrinsic.87-.62**-.47**-.02-.43**-.45**
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** p < .01
1 PSI Grace Scale includes Total Grace Scale Score (G), Responsible Grace (RG), Grace toward Self (GS), Grace toward Others (GO), and Grace over Works (GW).