Structural modelling of the interrelationships between Christian faith, religious orientation and love styles

English: This study was designed to investigate the relationship between Evangelical Christian faith and romantic love. The investigation was done through the analysis, by means of structural equation modelling, of a priori models proposing various ways in which these variables could possibly be related. The literature review of this study revealed the necessity of delimiting studies in the field of religion to specific and narrowly-defined religious groupings, and also provided a working and measurable definition of Evangelical Christian faith. Furthermore, psychological research into love, focusing on that emanating from the work of Lee (1977), was reviewed. A clarification of the terms used by Lee and their original meanings, and how these terms relate to a Christian definition of love was provided. Three scales were used in this study. Data were collected from a sample of 369 young, unmarried, White South African Evangelical Christians. Prior to the analysis of the latent variable models, the psychometric suitability of the scales to be used was examined by means of reliability analyses and Comprehensive Exploratory Factor Analyses (Tateneni, Mels, Cudeck & Browne, 2001). The Shepherd Scale (Bassett et al., 1981) proved to be psychometrically inadequate, even after trimming the 38 items down to 16. This study could not replicate factor structures found in the literature for this scale, and it is doubtful whether the scale is a useful research tool. The Religious Orientation Scale (All port & Ross, 1967) was trimmed so as to maximise its reliability and its convergent and discriminant validity, yielding a shortened scale of seven items each for Intrinsic and Extrinsic. The Love Attitudes Scale (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986) was also trimmed (from 42 to 24 items), and the shortened version agreed almost completely with a shortened version developed by Hendrick et al. (1998). The trimmed versions of all three scales were cross-validated on a previous data set, with the Love Attitudes Scale performing best, and the Shepherd Scale not validating well at all. The a priori models tested did not deliver acceptable fit with the data. It was discovered that the Shepherd Scale played a mediational role on the influence of Intrinsic and Extrinsic on the love styles of Agape and Storge, and Ludus, respectively. These influences were incorporated into two further models, with the best model being that in which Intrinsic was posited as a cause of Relationship, which in turn functioned as a cause of both Agape and Storge. Extrinsic (correlated with Intrinsic) was also posited as a cause of Doctrine, which functioned as a cause of Ludus. Numerous equivalent models were considered, although the two models posited a posteriori were favoured. In view of the poor structure of the Shepherd Scale, and because of the manner in which the mediational effect of the Shepherd Scale variables was uncovered, these two models must be seen as tentative, as their statistical selection may have been due to a capitalisation on chance. It ·is recommended that the study be repeated, testing the two a posteriori models on new (but similar) samples, and also on different cultural groupings, various very specifically defined and delimited religious groupings, age groupings, and love status groupings. It is also recommended that clinicians and counsellors take cognisance of the relationship between faith and love amongst their Christian clients.