Measuring religious literacy: towards building an instrument

In recent years, academics and advocates alike have argued that we need Religious Literacy (RL) to live in harmony in increasingly diverse societies. However, much of this literature is normative, with few attempts at testing the claims in the literature empirically. One of the main obstacles to doing this is the lack of a measuring instrument. This paper describes the process of building such an instrument, with a focus on establishing the content validity of the instrument. Content validity is one of the main criteria when building new survey instruments, but it has been underutilised in the field of RL. This article tests the validity in two ways: First, with a Content Validity Index to ensure the content validity of the instrument designed to measure religious literacy, based on expert assessments. Second, it assesses construct validity through Confirmatory Factor Analysis, using survey data (N = 499) consisting of first-year high-school students in Finland. The article provides a roadmap towards building similar instruments for testing the claims of the Religious Literacy literature in other cultural contexts.