Compare methods

	Religious Doubt Scale	Religious Fundamentalism Scale
Field	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
Family	Latent structure	Latent structure
Year of origin	2002	1992
Originator	Bruce Hunsberger, Michael Pratt & S. Mark Pancer	Bob Altemeyer & Bruce Hunsberger
Type	Latent measure of degree of religious doubting	Unidimensional balanced attitude scale
Seminal source	Hunsberger, B., Pratt, M., & Pancer, S. M. (2002). A longitudinal study of religious doubts in high school and beyond: Relationships, stability, and searching for answers. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 41(2), 255-266.	Altemeyer, B., & Hunsberger, B. (1992). Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, quest, and prejudice. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2(2), 113-133.
Aliases	Religious Doubts Measure, Hunsberger Doubt Scale, Doubting About Religion Scale, Religious Questioning Measure	RF Scale, Altemeyer-Hunsberger Fundamentalism Scale, Religious Fundamentalism (RF) Measure, Fundamentalism Attitude Scale
Related	3	3
Summary	The Religious Doubt Scale, associated with Bruce Hunsberger and colleagues, measures the extent to which a person doubts or questions religious beliefs and issues. Rather than asking only whether someone believes, it captures the often-overlooked experience of uncertainty — wondering whether God exists, whether scripture is true, whether evil disproves a loving deity, or whether one's tradition has things right. Respondents rate their level of doubt across a range of religious issues, and the items combine into an overall doubt score. Hunsberger, Pratt, and Pancer's longitudinal work followed religious doubts from high school into early adulthood, examining how stable doubts are, how they relate to other religious orientations such as quest and fundamentalism, and how a searching, answer-seeking stance figures in religious development.	The Religious Fundamentalism (RF) Scale, introduced by Bob Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger in 1992, measures fundamentalism as a psychological attitude rather than as membership in any particular tradition. They defined it as the belief that one's religion holds a single set of fundamental, inerrant truths about humanity and deity, that this truth is opposed by forces of evil that must be resisted, and that it must be followed today according to the practices of the past. Crucially the scale is content-general: it can be answered by adherents of any religion and taps the structure of the belief rather than its specific doctrines. Built as a balanced scale with equal numbers of pro- and con-trait items to control for response bias, the RF Scale was developed alongside studies linking fundamentalism to right-wing authoritarianism and prejudice.