Assessment, Statistics, and Research: Assess beliefs in divine healing

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Measuring Pentecostal & Charismatic Spirituality

One area of the Psychology of Religion that has been understudied is Pentecostal and Charismatic spirituality. As you might suspect, researchers will define these terms in various ways and, indeed, there are varied beliefs and practices around the world amongst people who identify as Pentecostal or Charismatic.

If outsiders know anything about these "people of the Spirit," they may think of people who speak in tongues, which has become a well-known phenomenon that has made its way into novels and movies.

An additional phenomenon is divine healing. Belief in miracles has marked the Christian faith since its inception. And many Christians believe in prayer for healing. Nevertheless, there has been an emphasis amongst Pentecostals and Charismatics to believe not only that God heals but also that some people are blessed with a gift of healing. The practice usually involves anointing with olive oil followed by prayer for the sick.

In this post, I report on three subscales that my colleagues and I have found useful in survey projects aimed at understanding the relationship of Pentecostal and Charismatic spirituality to other factors. I will report the items with their subscales and our internal consistency values (Chronbach's alpha). I will also report the references to our publications so they can be cited appropriately.

The original publication of the scales is in Sutton, Jordan, and Worthington (2014). In that article you will find our analyses of scale structure, correlations with other variables, and prediction of two factors considered germane to Christianity -- love represented by measures of compassion and forgiveness. A second publication examined only only the Service and Healing subscales in a study of Christian counselors (Sutton, Arnzen, and Kelly, 2016).

Readers have permission to use these scales and items in research and teaching by simply citing the references below.

Christian Service Subscale = 3 items

Alpha = .99 and .82 (Sutton, Jordan, Worthington 2014)

Alpha = 78 (Sutton, Arnzen, Kelly, 2016)

1. I am an effective witness for my faith.