The Contrition Assessment Scale (CAS): The development and preliminary validation of a scale to assess a person's disposition to the spiritual emotion of contrition

PROBLEM: The problem of this study was to develop a scale to assess the spiritual emotion of contrition that demonstrated preliminary reliability and validity.;PROCEDURES: Four instruments used in the study were a demographic survey developed by the author, the development version of the CAS, Watson and colleagues' Beliefs about Sin Scale (BASS), and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale---Short Form. The study consisted of four phases of data collection and four phases of data analysis: an expert phase, a pilot phase, a development phase, and a validation phase. First, eight experts rated the original battery of 64 items related to contrition on clarity and importance. Second, thirty church members rated 69 contrition items on clarity. Third, a demographic survey, 62 items related to contrition, and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale were given to 421 adults. Adults associated with a local church, a Christian counseling center, or graduate counseling students at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary completed 412 valid surveys. Item content, item means and standard deviations, scale and individual item reliability analyses, exploratory, principal components factor analysis, and parallel analysis procedures helped determine the best items to retain for the CAS. Fourth, the current version of the CAS and the BASS were administered to 51 adults.;FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS: An efficient scale that achieved preliminary reliability and validity was developed. The acquisition and assimilation of feedback from the expert panel provided sufficient preliminary validity and therefore a rejection of the null hypothesis related to validity. The second hypothesis related to reliability was partially rejected and partially accepted. The suggested, 24-item CAS obtained a Cronbach's a of .863. Since this was greater than .8, this part of the hypothesis related to reliability was rejected. Each item in the suggested version of the scale did not achieve an item-total correlation of .5 or above. This part of the hypothesis related to reliability was accepted. Each item within its respective subscale, however, did obtain an item-total correlation of .3 or above. Three subscales within the CAS surfaced: Longing for Righteousness (LR); Sin Awareness (SA); and Grace Awareness (GA). Nine items were recommended for LR (Cronbach's alpha =.787), eight items were recommended for SA (Cronbach's alpha =.763), and seven items were recommended for GA (Cronbach's alpha =.677). Fifty-one adults completed the suggested 24-item CAS and the 28-item BASS during the validation phase. A small, positive correlation was obtained between the two scales (r =.251). These findings support the development of psychological instruments that assess explicitly Christian constructs.