Assessment, Statistics, and Research

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

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

Why aren't tests reliable? The reason tests are not reliable is that reliability is a property of the interpretation of scores not the tests themselves.   This isn't a matter of semantics. Think about it this way. Give all the students in one school an achievement test. The test items don't change so they appear stable, consistent, and reliable. However, when publishers report reliability values, they calculate the reliability statistics based on scores. Scores vary from one administration to another. If you ever took a test twice and got a different score, you know what I mean. Individuals change from day to day. And we change from year to year. Also, even a representative sample of students for a nation can be different each year. Every time we calculate a reliability statistic, the statistic is slightly different. Reliability values vary with the sample. Reliability values vary with the method of calculation. Reliability values also vary with the method us