Assessment, Statistics, and Research

Understanding Descriptive Statistics:  A Simple Guide for Students When you first step into an introductory statistics class, you’ll meet a set of tools that help you describe data. These are called descriptive statistics, and they’re the foundation for everything else you’ll learn later—whether that’s probability, hypothesis testing, or research methods. Think of descriptive statistics as the “snapshot” tools of data analysis. They help you answer three big questions: 1. Where is the center of my data? 2. How spread out is it? 3. What does the overall shape look like? Let’s walk through the essentials. 1. Measures of Central Tendency: Finding the Center These statistics tell you what’s “typical” in a dataset. Mean – The average. Add up all the values and divide by how many there are. Median – The middle value when the data are sorted. Great when your data have outliers. Mode – The most frequent value. Useful for categories (like favorite ice cream flavors). Why it matters: If y...

Assessment name: Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale- 5-Item (RSS-5) Scale overview: The five-item version of the Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale (RSS-5) is a reliable measure of clinically relevant struggles (divine, interpersonal, moral, doubt, ultimate meaning struggles) in mental health care settings. Authors : Sarah G. Salcone, Julie J. Exline, Kenneth I. Pargament, Joseph M. Currier, Ryon C. McDermott, Don E. Davis, Amanda M. Raines, Yejin Lee Cite this post Sutton, G.W. (2025). Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale- 5-Item (RSS-5). Assessment, Statistics, and Research .  https://statistics.suttong.com/2025/03/religious-and-spiritual-struggles-scale.html Response Type: Participants rated each item on a scale of occurrence from 1 = Not at all to 5 = A great deal.  Scale items: There are five items–one from each of the five subscales of the long RSS scale.    Example Questioned whether life really matters. Felt as though God had abandon...

Counseling 2025 by Geoffrey W Sutton and artspace.ai Assessment name: Cultural Humility Scale Short Form Scale overview: The Cultural Humility Scale Short Form (CHS-SF) has two 3-item subscales (positive/negative cultural humility) developed for clinical practice. In two studies, the authors provided evidence for strong internal consistency, supportive construct and discriminant validity. Authors : Coleman, J. J., Grajzel, K., Dong, Y., Davis, D. E., DeBlaere, C., Hook, J. N., & Owen, J. Response Type: Participants rate the Cultural Humility Scale Short Form on a five-point scale of agreement from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Scale items:    There are three positive and three negative items.     The instructions read:    [Regarding the core aspect(s) of my cultural background, my counselor…]    A positive item: Is considerate    A negative item: Makes assumptions about me. Psychometric properties: See the included tables...

Assessment name: Dominance an IPIP scale Scale overview: T he dominance scale is one of 33 preliminary IPIP scales purported to measure a similar construct on Gough’s California Psychological Inventory. Authors : See the reference link below. Response Type: A suggested response type is to instruct participants to rate items on a degree of how accurate the item describes themselves. Following is a quote between the hyphen lines from the IPIP website. ------ How Accurately Can You Describe Yourself? 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 manner, your responses will be kept in absolute confidence. Indicate for each statement whether it is 1. Very Inaccurate, 2. Moderately Inaccurate, 3. Neither Accurate Nor Inaccurate, 4. Moderately Accurate, or 5. Very Accurate a...

Christian-Secular Culture 2025 Assessment name: Cultural Christian: A Qualitative Questionnaire (CCQC) Scale overview: The Cultural Christian: A Qualitative Questionnaire (CCQC) consists of a set of questions designed to identify how closely an interviewee aligns with the characteristics of a cultural Christian, as opposed to someone who actively adheres to the core tenets of Christianity and participates in a recognized Christian denomination or group (Sutton, 2025). Author : Geoffrey W. Sutton. References for the scale:  Cite this post. Sutton, G. W. (2025, January 28). Cultural Christian: A Qualitative Questionnaire.  Assessment, Statistics, and Research .  https://statistics.suttong.com/2025/01/cultural-christian-qualitative-measure.html Response Type: Open-ended questions. SCALE ITEMS The following questions can aid in interviews and research on Christian types. Clinicians and researchers can adjust these questions based on their needs. The answers can help differe...

Assessment name:  Adolescent Religious Coping Scale Scale overview: The Adolescent Religious Coping Scale is a multidimensional measure of adolescent religious coping developed to assess the relationship between religious coping and emotional functioning.  Authors : Jeffrey P. Bjorck and others – see 2010 reference below Response Type : Self-report ratings Scale items: There are seven subscales as follows organized in two groupings: I. ACTIVE COPING 1 Positive God focused Coping 2 Seeking Religious Support 3 Constructive Distraction II. PASSIVE COPING 4 Questioning 5 Avoidance 6 Denial 7 Deferring Psychometric properties The main sample data were gathered from 2 Christian schools in Southern California. (N = 500) The second sample was from a Church of Christ Congregation in Texas (N = 62). The results of factor analysis supported 7 factors and 39 total items. Cronbach alpha values are provided in the article. There is support for content, construct, and concurrent validity in...