A psychometric evaluation of Poloma and Pendleton's (1991) Measure of Prayer Experience

Recently there has been an increased interest in the use of prayer as a measure of religiosity within empirical research. Additionally, there has been a departure from the use of single-item measures of prayer frequency. One such departure has been the development of the Measure of Prayer Experience by M.M. Poloma and B.F. Pendleton in 1991, which uses five items to measure experiences during prayer. The present study provided a factor analytical evaluation of the Measure of Prayer Experience, including an examination of the reliability of the scale, to supplement limited existing data. The measure was administered among a sample of 518 Irish respondents. The scale was found to be reliable, and exploratory factor analysis revealed that it was also unidimensional.