Assessment, Statistics, and Research

Photo for illustration purposes only “If Jesus is God, how could he create the world if he wasn’t born yet.”                      —Girl, age 7 It will be a while until this 7-year-old passes through the stage of concrete operations and begins to pull apart various mental constructs in a serious fashion. Along the way she’ll pick up many metaphors, including those that unravel men’s thinking about God hundreds of years ago. And all sorts of other metaphors. Americans are known for being religious and in particular, for being Christian; however, as is commonly said, the devil is in the details . In this post, I look at religious survey items to make a point about being careful when writing and interpreting survey items containing concepts with a range of meaning. ********* God- Who is God? Gallup keeps tabs on Americans’ views on God. In an interesting article, Hrynowski ( 2019 ) reveals a different response rate for beliefs in God depending on how the question is asked. Spec

  Pentecostal worship from Bing free to use Trice and Bjorck (2006b) conducted a survey of Pentecostals to determine their views on the causes and cures of depression. Their set of 25 treatment (i.e., cure) items is available for researchers. There are 25 “cure” or treatment items in their survey. These items are divided into categories, which are reported below along with alpha values found in their article (Trice & Bjork, 2006b). Spiritual discipline (.60) Faith practices (.63) Rest (.76) Support (.61) Health (.57) Psychology/psychiatry (.72) Neurology (.62) Instructions Prior to completing the survey, participants are given the following definition of depression: "Depression is a disorder of mood (e.g., feelings, emotions) characterized by sadness and dejection, decreased motivation and interest in life, negative thoughts, and such physical symptoms as sleep disturbance, loss of appetite, and fatigue. Moreover, these characteristics last at least 2 wee

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