A Brief Measure of Intrinsic Religiosity Used with a Sample of Military Veterans

A brief, three-item measure of intrinsic religiosity adapted from Gorsuch and Venable (1983) was used with over 900 male and female Reserve Component veterans who had been serving in the military during the Persian Gulf War. In general, approximately two-thirds of the veterans indicated agreement or strong agreement with an internal commitment to their religious beliefs. Despite its brevity, the scale demonstrated adequate estimates of internal consistency reliability (alpha = .93). It was also found that the female veterans reported a significantly higher mean on intrinsic religiosity as measured by this scale than did the male veterans.