Assessment, Statistics, and Research

  Islamic Center of America (Bing Free to Share & Use/ Wikipedia) Assessment name:   Islamophobia Scale (IS) Scale overview: The Islamophobia Scale (IS) is a 16-item, two-factor, self-report measure of a person’s fear-related attitudes toward Muslims and the religion of Islam. Authors: Lee, Gibbons, and Thompson Response Type: Scale items: There are 8 items for each of two factors (subscales) for a total of 16 items. AB factor: Islamophobia Affective-Behavioral Items include statements about avoiding contact with Muslims and concerns about safety around Muslims. CG factor: Islamophobia Cognitive Items include statements about Islam and danger, violence, evil, and killing of non-Muslims as well as Islam as anti-American. Psychometric properties Internal consistency: Alpha values: For scale AB = .92, Scale CG = .93 (Lee et al., 2013) Tests-retest reliability: For an average of 11.56 days, the values for each scale were AB = .85, CG = .96 (Lee et al....

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 ...

 T he Biblical Literalism Scale (BLS) is a 10-item scale found in an article by Andrew Village (2005). The content of the scale includes biblical events rated by participants on a scale as follows: ‘definitely happened’, ‘probably happened’, ‘not certain’, ‘probably a story’ or ‘definitely a story.’ High scores indicated a more literal belief. Findings : The survey sample consisted of 404 Christian participants. Scores ranged from 10 (all of the items were rated as stories) to 50 (all items rated as “definitely happened”). Old Testament items were rated as less literal than New Testament items. The average scores were highest in Evangelical churches and lowest in Anglo-Catholic churches. Correlation of scores with other variables BLS and frequent charismatic experience ( r = .51) (note a) BLS and frequent Bible reading ( r = .47) (note b) BLS and age ( r = -.17) BLS and education ( r = -.14) Women scored only slightly higher on (39.8) literalism than did me...

Photo by Geoff W. Sutton, 2017 Researchers define religious fundamentalism in different ways. One recent model focuses on the way religious people view their sacred text. I have written about the Intratextual Fundamentalism model in a previous post ( October 2013) . In this post, I provide some data related to the 5-item version of the Intratextual Fundamentalism Scale (IFS), which I have found useful in research projects. The revised version of the scale (IFS) has five items--each measuring a dimension of intratextuality (Williamson, Hood, Ahmad, Sadiq, & Hill, 2010). Here are the five dimensions (from my previous blog): Divine : The sacred text is a revelation from God (or of divine origin) to humans. Regardless of the involvement of people in the writing of the text, God (or a deity) is the author. Inerrant : The sacred text does not contain errors, inconsistencies, or contradictions. The text is objectively true. Privileged : The sacred text of the fundamentalist gr...