Religiosity Index: a proposal for theorizing and measuring contemporary religious phenomena

With this paper, we intend to understand what theoretical and empirical strategies allow us to measure the centrality and intensity of traditional religious meanings, as well as its more plural and diffuse modern expressions, in the individuals' life, in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century. For that purpose, we offer a conceptualization and measurement model of religion – an index of religiosity – that we consider being effective and adequate to describe and measure its manifold contemporary expressions and dimensions. In order to build our index, we drew on some of the existing patterns of measurement, namely Huber & Huber’s work, and on three specific statistical databases: the European Values Survey (1999-2008), the European Social Survey (2002-2014), and the World Christian Database (2015). To go beyond the theoretical constructs and the standardization of a religiosity index, we analyze and measure religion in a specific group of European countries and we compare the various levels of religiosity among them.