The Development and Validation of a God-Centered Self-Esteem Scale

The present study was conducted to develop and validate a God-centered self-esteem scale that assesses an individual's evaluations of the self in the context of God's love, availability, and ability to help. Results showed that the newly-constructed God-centered self-esteem scale had acceptable psychometric properties in terms of internal consistency and correlations with known psychological correlates of self-esteem and predicted religious variables. God-centered self-esteem and self-esteem were moderately correlated, indicating distinctiveness while sharing conceptual overlaps. Further support for the distinctiveness of God-centered self-esteem could be observed from (a) items of its scale loading uniquely on a separate factor, (b) its differential pattern of correlations with the psychological and religious variables, and (c) its ability to provide incremental validity with respect to depression, hope, optimism, and stress, beyond self-esteem. Having shown good psycho:metric properties and practical utility, this new scale is worthy of further research.