Sanctification Measures

Sanctification measures, developed by Annette Mahoney and Kenneth Pargament, quantify the degree to which a person perceives a specific aspect of life — a marriage, the body, parenting, work, personal goals — as sacred. The framework defines sanctification as the process by which an object of life takes on spiritual character and significance, and it is measured along two routes: theistic sanctification, the perception that the object is a manifestation of God, and non-theistic sanctification, the perception that it possesses sacred qualities such as being blessed, holy, or transcendent even without explicit reference to God. Because almost any domain can be sanctified, the measures are target-specific, and across studies higher sanctification predicts greater investment in, and benefit from, the sanctified object.