«God as a Causal Agent»: Religious Attribution in Orthodox Context

The paper summarises the process of adaptation of the God as a Causal Agent Scale (GCA) carried out on a sample of students of orthodox educational institutions. This scale aims to measure religious attribution in an individual, that is, is/her inclination to attribute the causes of events to divine agents. The data obtained in the study proved that all items of the GCA Scale have acceptable internal consistency. The first stage of validisation involved analysing the correlations with the rates of the Subjective Control Scale (SCS). Weak positive correlations were found with the rates of internality in all scales of the SCS except for the Interpersonal Relationships scale. The second stage invovled a quasiexperimental study that revealed positive correlations between the GCA and supernatural attribution. Moreover, the outcomes of factor analysis of variance showed significant differences between the subjects with high and low rates in GCA in their likeliness to use supernatural explanations. All these findings suggest that the GCA Scale is an effective tool for measuring one’s inclination to religious attribution within the Russian orthodox context.

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