Assessment, Statistics, and Research

    According to the just world hypothesis , “people have a need to believe that their environment is a just and orderly place where people usually get what they deserve (Lerner & Miller, 1978, p. 1030).” Beliefs about a just world may be measured with the Global Belief in a Just World Scale (Lipkus, 1991). The scale has 7-items, which participants rate on a 6-point basis: 1 = strong disagreement and 6 = strong disagreement about the applicability of an item to oneself. Permission According to PsycTESTS, contact the publisher and corresponding author. Author contact as of 21 December 2020 https://scholars.duke.edu/person/isaac.lipkus Sample items 1. I feel that people get what they are entitled to have. 7. I basically feel that the world is a fair place.   References Lerner, M. J., & Miller, D. T. (1978). Just world research and the attribution process: Looking back and ahead.  Psychological Bulletin ,  85 (5), 1030–1051.  https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-

  Mental health professionals have recognized the importance of religion and spirituality to wellbeing. I have seen intake forms that ignore spirituality or ask only about a person’s religious identity or if they would like a visit from a chaplain or clergy during a hospitalization. Clinicians can reasonably ask how to explore the importance of spirituality to treatment without being overly intrusive or disrespectful when a patient does not volunteer relevant information. David Hodge (2013) offers four screening questions based on his review of the literature (p. 98). I offer a paraphrase of Hodge’s suggestions and suggest consulting his chapter, which I found in my university library (see reference below). Each question is tied to a one-word therapeutic purpose. 1. Importance How important is spiritual or religious faith to you? 2. Affiliation Do you attend religious services? Do you participate in any groups that would be considered religious or spiritual? 3. Resources

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