Assessment, Statistics, and Research

One way to think about the components of religion is three-dimensional, which includes  beliefs, practices, and experiences.  A few years ago, a group of us studied Christian counseling to discover what Christian counselors actually did that was different from other counselors (Sutton, Arnzen, & Kelly, 2016). We wanted to get more specific about the identity of Christian counselors--beyond a simple checklist of their affiliation with a large group such as Presbyterian or a movement such as Pentecostal. As part of our plan to be more specific about spirituality, we created a few measures.  Previously, I reported on a scale for assessing spiritual practices . This time I present a measure of beliefs, the Christian   Beliefs Index .             The wording of the items clearly applies to the Christian faith, but the point of our measure was to be more precise about the diversity of beliefs within Christian cultures (i.e., groups or denominations). I’ll comment on the item