Preliminary Analyses of Three Measures of Grace: Can They be Unified?

Abstract

Grace is an interesting and potentially significant domain within positive psychology, but remains largely neglected. The present study examined the relationships among three known grace scales to evaluate the potential for creating a stronger single measure. It also explored their relationships to several other religious/spiritual measures to examine whether the three scales are measuring the same construct, to explore the implications for our understanding of grace, and to provide insights for further study. The three measures had moderately strong correlations with each other (r = .55 to .66), had similar relationships to other measures of religion/spirituality, and had distinct relationships to measures of psychological health and distress. This suggested that the three scales measure somewhat different constructs. Two grace scales showed significant negative skew, indicating ceiling problems. Differences in the underlying grace constructs, contamination by other concepts, or an underlying multidimensional structure for grace could account for these differences. Further study should better articulate the constructs underlying grace measures, address problems related to negative skew in responses, and clarify whether grace is multidimensional.

Dimensions of grace: Factor analysis of three grace scales.

“…Mean response scores for the three grace measures in the present study are similar to those reported by Bufford at al. (2015).…”

“…The three grace scales showed significant correlations with each other (Bufford at al., 2015). The Grace scale showed significant positive correlations with spiritual well-being and both religious and existential well-being, gratitude, and positive religious coping; it showed negative correlations with internalized shame, negative religious coping, childhood adversity, and a measure of psychological distress (Bufford at al., 2015). The Richmont Grace Scale (RGS) showed this same pattern of correlations except that it did not correlate significantly with childhood adversity (Bufford, at al., 2015).…”

Tangible Experiences of Grace: A Qualitative Investigation of Divine Grace in Roman Catholics

“…Emmons et al ( 2017 ) noted that grace is “the gift of acceptance given unconditionally and voluntarily to an undeserving person by an unobligated giver... grace reflects a vital psychological need held by all people” (p. 276). Recently, grace has been investigated in a handful of quantitative studies in conservative Protestant populations (Bufford et al, 2015 , 2017 ; Judd et al, 2020 ). However, to date there have been no quantitative or qualitative studies that have focused explicitly on the aspects of how Catholics uniquely experience God’s divine grace, which is an ongoing and prominent aspect of Catholic life.…”

Experiences of Divine Grace Among Christian Friends

“…Current instruments have heavily influenced by evangelical perspectives, and lack the methodological rigor expected in other areas within the psychology of religion (Bassett and the Roberts Wesleyan Research Group, 2013;Beckenbach et al, 2010;Bufford et al, 2015;Bufford et al, 2017;Hodge, 2020). Due to the growing diversity within Christianity as well as the transformation of language in an emerging postmodern society, standardized measures need to assess for an array of beliefs.…”