ABSTRACT
As a personality psychologist trained by Drs. Costa and McCrae (RLP), it was not much of a stretch to approach the study of religiousness/spirituality (R/S) phenomena from the perspective of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality. This empirically developed taxonomy has been shown to represent a robust structure capable of serving as a meaningful paradigm for understanding character-based individual difference constructs (McCrae, 2010; Piedmont, 1998; Piedmont, McCrae, & Costa, 1991). As noted in Chapter 4, McCrae (1999) has argued that any examination of a trait-based construct would benefit from evaluating it within this framework. Embedding a construct within the FFM would accomplish two things: a) to demonstrate the empirical pedigree of the construct and to provide acknowledgment of its psychological relevance; and, b) to facilitate the integration of the construct into larger models of psychosocial functioning.
