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Ministry stressors and the well-being of Christian clergy have received attention in research due to the unique challenges clergy face in the ministry environment (Lee, 2007; Webb & Chase, 2019). For example, Francis et al. (2008) identified the multiple functions of clergy, including preaching, caring for church members, conducting marriages and funerals, and administration. Additionally, clergy experience a number of work-related stressors due to the congregation's unrealistic expectations, role overload, boundary ambiguity, intrusive congregational behavior, relational intensity, and emotional labor (Adams et al., 2017; Lee, 2007). Researchers have examined how work-related stressors impact clergy's psychological well-being and have urged the exploration of population-specific factors that influence clergy well-being (Francis et al., 2017; Proeschold-Bell et al., 2015). It is imperative to know the psychological measures pertaining to clergy for research and clinical assessment. Thus, in this article, we present existing clergy-specific measures that assess various dimensions of clergy work environment, ministry experience, and well-being that practitioners and researchers can utilize to inform psychological research and clinical practice.
Search Method and Selection Guidelines
For this column, we focused on measures related to Christian clergy and well-being. We first conducted a search in the PsycTests database using the search terms [clergy], [pastor·], and [ministry] to search by test name and acronym and by construct. To determine the measures most appropriate for this column, we used the following selection guidelines:
1. Included scales applicable to the Christian faith; excluded scales designed for other religious groups (e.g., Muslims).
2. Included scales related to the psychological well-being of clergy; excluded those not directly related to psychological health (e.g., attitude towards illegal immigration).
After the initial round of searching, we conducted another search in the PsycINFO database using the search terms [clergy] or [pastor·] + [well-being]. We included two additional measures that were designed specifically to examine clergy well-being.
Clergy-Specific Measures
Francis Burnout Inventory (FBI)
The FBI (Francis et al., 2005) is comprised of two 11-item subscales that assess the positive and negative aspects of clergy work experience, with the positive affect assessed by the Satisfaction in Ministry Scale (SIMS) and the negative affect assessed by the Scale of Emotional Exhaustion in Ministry (SEEM). A SIMS sample item is "I have accomplished many worthwhile things in my current ministry." A SEEM sample...