Assessment, Statistics, and Research

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 subsc

Independent Samples t- test Researchers use the independent samples t -test to find out if there is a significant difference between two sets of data. In the behavioral sciences, the data are often two sets of scores on tests or survey items. Significance can mean a lot of different things. In behavioral science, it is common to think of significance as a frequently occurring, and thus reliable, difference. Sometimes the language of statistics can be confusing. The independent sample t -test evaluates the differences between the arithmetic mean s of the two groups of scores, and assumes the scores are normally distributed . Usually, a difference needs to be at least large enough that a score difference as large, or larger than the one obtained, occurs only 5% of the time by chance. The calculations are usually done in spreadsheets like Excel or Google Sheets or in a program like SPSS . See the link below for a download about how to calculate a t-test. You wil

You can quickly reverse score survey items using widely available spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets or SPSS. For example, the freely available scale to measure Valor/ Bravery/ Courage has 10 items rated on a 1 – 5 scale. High scores represent more of the trait. But 4 items are worded as negative statements so, you have to reverse the item scores on the negative items to obtain a correct total score for courage. Sometimes test and survey creators refer to items as + or – keyed. Positive items are added together and the negative items must be reverse scored before adding to the total. Survey Items Example Following are the general directions for the 5-point rating from www.ipip.org Describe yourself as you generally are now, not as you wish to be in the future. Describe yourself as you honestly see yourself, in relation to other people you know of the same sex as you are, and roughly your same age. So that you can describe yourself in an honest ma