Table 3 Measures of religiosity and spirituality

In many studies, aspects of religiosity such as faith or closeness to God, religious doubt, frequency of church attendance, prayer, and youth group participation, as well as the importance of religion were assessed by one or two questions with Likert scale options [24, 27, 29, 30, 34,35,36,37,38, 45, 50, 51, 54, 61, 93].

Measures of religiosity and spirituality largely fell into four categories:

1. Engagement in organisational and formal religious practices e.g., Religious Background and Behaviour Scale (RBB) [62, 94], and Organizational Religiousness Short Form [69, 95]

2. Personal importance of religion (religious salience) e.g., items assessing personal importance/confidence [96], Private Religious Practices Scale [97], Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality (BMMRS) [98], Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity ([29], Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale [99], Religious Background and Behavior (RBB) scale [94], Religious Orientation Scale [55], questions from Social Cultural Developments Dutch Sociological Questionnaire (SOCON) [58, 100].

3. Religious coping was most commonly measured by brief- RCOPE [19, 22, 23, 25, 44, 52, 53, 101]. Other measures included Children’s Religious Coping Scale [21], Coping Orientations to Problems Experienced scale [43]. Religious Strain Scale (which measured spiritual struggle) [60], and Ways of Religious Coping (WORCS) [67].

4. Spiritual wellbeing was measured by the Spiritual Wellbeing Scale [102], the Spiritual Involvement and Beliefs Scale [103], Spirituality Index of Wellbeing (life scheme and self-efficacy) [61, 104], Index of Core Spiritual Experience (INSPIRIT) [47], Religious Comfort Scale [43], Spiritual Meaning Scale [22], Spiritual Transcendence Index [40], Spiritual and Wellbeing Scale [85], Spiritual Involvement and Beliefs Scale [85], and King’s Spiritual Intelligence Scale [72].

Multiple aspects of religiosity and spirituality were measured by scales such as Age Universal Intrinsic-Extrinsic Scale [32, 49], Duke University Religion Index [35, 36], Fetzer Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality (BMMRS) [22, 24, 32, 55, 56], and short form-Francis Attitudes toward Christianity Scale [33, 34, 38], The Family Environment Scale was used in a single study to measure aspects of religious beliefs in the family [20].