Measuring Cross-Cultural Supernatural Beliefs with Self- and Peer-Reports

M. Bluemke, Jonathan Jong, D. Grevenstein, I. Mikloušić, J. Halberstadt

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    17 Citations (Scopus)
    75 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Despite claims about the universality of religious belief, whether religiosity scales have the same meaning when administered inter-subjectively – or translated and applied cross-culturally – is currently unknown. Using the recent “Supernatural Belief Scale” (SBS), we present a primer on how to verify the strong assumptions of measurement invariance required in research on religion. A comparison of two independent samples, Croatians and New Zealanders, showed that, despite a sophisticated psychometric model, measurement invariance could be demonstrated for the SBS except for two noninvariant intercepts. We present a new approach for inspecting measurement invariance across self- and peer-reports as two dependent samples. Although supernatural beliefs may be hard to observe in others, the measurement model was fully invariant for Croatians and their nominated peers. The results not only establish, for the first time, a valid measure of religious supernatural belief across two groups of different language and culture, but also demonstrate a general invariance test for distinguishable dyad members nested within the same targets. More effort needs to be made to design and validate cross-culturally applicable measures of religiosity.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article numbere0164291
    JournalPLoS ONE
    Volume11
    Issue number10
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 19 Oct 2016

    Bibliographical note

    The full text is also available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0164291
    This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Measuring Cross-Cultural Supernatural Beliefs with Self- and Peer-Reports'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this