UNSOLICITED RELIGIOUS SOCIAL PERSUASION REACTION SCALE (URSPRS): DEVELOPMENT AND MIXED-METHOD VALIDATION

Abstract

Unsolicited religious social persuasion refers to an unsolicited action aimed at convincing or persuading someone to join or become involved with one’s religion. Despite its potential emotional impact, no prior research has explored how such experiences affect nonreligious people. In the United States, being nonreligious is a concealable stigmatized identity, and those who identify as nonreligious encounter various forms of microaggressions. However, existing microaggression taxonomies do not account for experiences of unsolicited religious social persuasion. To address this gap in the literature, I developed and refined the Unsolicited Religious Social Persuasion Reaction Scale (URSPRS) to assess how nonreligious individuals react to these experiences. The present mixed-methods study aimed to evaluate the URSPRS’s psychometric properties and begin constructing a nomological network of related constructs. Nonreligious undergraduate students completed two online surveys spaced one month apart (Time 1: N = 343, Time 2: N = 195). Following confirmatory factor analysis and scale refinement, a two-factor model emerged with strong fit, and URSPRS scores demonstrated substantial test-retest reliability over the one-month interval. Qualitative responses to a hypothetical scenario involving unsolicited religious persuasion were manually coded for emotional valence and transformed into quantitative scores. Pearson’s r correlations were used to examine associations between URSPRS scores and related variables, and moderation and mediation analyses were conducted to explore additional relationships. The study findings provide preliminary evidence that the URSPRS is a stable and reliable measure. However, construct underrepresentation may impact the relationships between scores on the URSPRS and conceptually related constructs. When considering the negative reactions that many participants indicated and after examining the nature of unsolicited religious social persuasion, the findings support the interpretation of unsolicited religious social persuasion as a type of microaggression. Based on these findings, I propose a new microaggression taxonomy that includes unsolicited persuasion and is applicable to various chosen identities. Limitations, future directions, and implications for clinical practice are included.