Compare methods

	Religious Fundamentalism Scale	Religious Orientation Scale (ROS)
Field	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
Family	Latent structure	Latent structure
Year of origin	1992	1967
Originator	Bob Altemeyer & Bruce Hunsberger	Gordon W. Allport & J. Michael Ross
Type	Unidimensional balanced attitude scale	Two-factor attitudinal scale with fourfold categorization
Seminal source	Altemeyer, B., & Hunsberger, B. (1992). Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, quest, and prejudice. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2(2), 113-133.	Allport, G. W., & Ross, J. M. (1967). Personal religious orientation and prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5(4), 432-443.
Aliases	RF Scale, Altemeyer-Hunsberger Fundamentalism Scale, Religious Fundamentalism (RF) Measure, Fundamentalism Attitude Scale	Allport-Ross ROS, Religious Orientation Scale, Intrinsic-Extrinsic Religious Orientation Scale, Indiscriminate Proreligious Categorization
Related	3	3
Summary	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.	The Religious Orientation Scale (ROS), introduced by Gordon Allport and J. Michael Ross in 1967, is the instrument that operationalized Allport's distinction between two motivational stances toward faith. The extrinsic orientation treats religion as a means to other ends — comfort, security, social standing — while the intrinsic orientation treats faith as the master motive that the believer lives by. The ROS measures the two orientations on separate item sets rather than as opposite ends of one continuum, which means a respondent can score high, low, or moderate on each independently. Allport and Ross used this independence to build a fourfold typology, adding the 'indiscriminately proreligious' (high on both) and 'indiscriminately antireligious' (low on both) categories, and showed that orientation, not mere churchgoing, predicted prejudice.