Assessment, Statistics, and Research

  Scale name: Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire,   SCSRF, SCSRFQ Short form as an “Abbreviated” form, ASCSRFQ Scale overview A short easy to score measure of the strength of a person’s religious or spiritual faith. It is a available in 10-item and 5-item Likert-type scale formats. Author(s) Thomas G. Plante and Marcus T. Boccaccini introduced the 10-item version in 1997. Items: 10 and 5 for the short form   Response Type: 4-point self-report rating scale Subscales: None   Sample items 2. I pray daily. 10. My faith impacts many of my decisions. The short form uses the following 5-items: 2,4,5,8 (Plante et al., 2002). Statistics In the 1997 article, psychology students M = 26.39, SD   = 8.55, R = 33, Mdn = 26. A summary of previous studies using the 10-item version (Plante, 2010) found M = 26-33 in college samples with SD   = 6 to 8. There were no significant differences between the means of men ( M = 17.48, SD   = 2.52) and

  Coefficient Alpha (also called "alpha") is a statistical value indicating the degree of internal consistency of items in a multiple-item scale like survey items or Likert-type scales. Internal consistency is one measure of reliability for scores from scales, measures, and survey items. The alpha statistic was developed by Lee Cronbach in 1951 thus it is also called Cronbach's alpha . In research reports, you may just see the Greek lower case letter alpha,  α. The procedure to calculate alpha can be found in SPSS under Analyze > Scale > Reliabilty. For research purposes, scales with alpha levels equal to or above alpha = .70 are acceptable. The best scales have values of alpha = .9 or higher. The alpha method works best to evaluate unidimensional measures. If there are two or more dimensions in a set of items, the alpha value will be lower so, when alpha values are low, consider which item or items do not support the primary dimension. Cite this Post Sutton, G.W.

  The bell curve is also known as the normal curve or normal distribution . The bell curve has mathematical  properties that allow researchers to draw conclusions about where scores (or data) are located relative to other scores (or data). Click hyperlinks for more details. The three measures of central tendency (mode, median, mean ) are at the same middle point in a normal curve. The numbers representing the middle of the bell curve divide the distribution in half. On the x -axis in the normal distribution, the mean is at zero and there are standard deviation units above and below the mean.  The height of the curve indicates the percentage of scores in that are a. You can see that a large percentage of the scores are between 1 and -1 standard deviations. About 68% of scores fall between +1 and -1 standard deviations from the mean.  Look at the illustration below to see that there are about 34% of the scores in falling one standard deviation above the mean and another 34% in one st