Religious Involvement Across Europe: Examining its Measurement Comparability

Abstract

Religion permeates many aspects of individuals’ lives and interplays with a multitude of other theoretical constructs of interest for researchers. The cross-national European Social Survey (ESS) includes the Religious Involvement scale for the comparative study of religiosity. However, the cross-national comparability of this scale has been investigated only occasionally. The current study examined the measurement invariance of the Religious Involvement scale across ESS countries in nine survey rounds (2002-2018). Our findings demonstrated that exact measurement invariance across all countries was not supported by the data, however approximate invariance could be established using the alignment procedure. The frequency of praying item was more invariant than the frequency of religious attendance and self-assessed religiosity indicators. Finally, we listed the comparable estimates of a mean country religious involvement. We conclude that the Religious Involvement scale in the ESS can be confidently used for the comparative study of religious involvement relying on the means estimated with the alignment method.

Keywords

• religious involvement
• measurement invariance (MI)
• European Social Survey (ESS)
• multiple group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA)
• alignment
• exact vs. approximate measurement invariance