A psychometric evaluation of the Measure of Prayer Experience (Richards, 1991)

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 (Richards, 1991), which uses six 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 estimates of the total scale and subscales, to supplement limited existing data. The measure was administered among a sample of 518 Irish respondents. Two alternative confirmatory factor analytic models were specified and tested. The correlated two-factor model was found to be a better description of the data than the uncorrelated two-factor model as suggested by Richards (1991).