No abstract

The development and preliminary validation of a new measure of Christian fundamentalism required a multi-stage process. In an initial exploratory study, participants indicated which of a set of Bible verses were most central to their faith, and factor analysis was used to identify verses that appeared to tap a latent dimension of religious fundamentalism (Study 1). These relationships were retested with a new method in a new sample (Study 2), and the items that predicted fundamentalism in both samples were incorporated into a new measure of Christian fundamentalism, the Bible Verse Selection Task (BVST). The forced-choice format of the BVST may be less impacted by social desirability response styles that may affect scores on existing fundamentalism scales (Studies 3 and 4) while preserving useful levels of criterion-related validity (Study 5) and convergent evidence of construct validity (Study 6). These studies provide initial psychometric evidence for the BVST as an internally consistent measure of Christian fundamentalism that predicts scores on other fundamentalism scales and related constructs including traditionalism, authoritarianism, and political conservativism.

College students (95 men and 264 women) rated how well 211 familiar proverbs described their behavior and beliefs. A factor analysis of these data yielded 7 major dimensions; many of the factors were similar to recognized lexical personality factors. Big Five Conscientiousness and Neuroticism were each strongly associated with a single proverb dimension (interpreted as Restraint and Enjoys Life, respectively). Big Five Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Intellect/Imagination were all associated with several proverb dimensions. Agreeableness was most strongly associated with proverb dimensions representing Machiavellian behavior and strong Group Ties, and both Extraversion and Intellect showed particularly notable associations with an Achievement Striving dimension. The 2 remaining proverb dimensions, which represented a belief that Life is Fair and an attitude of Cynicism, could not be accounted for by the Big Five.

Despite recent calls for establishing a paremiological minimum for the United States, there has been little systematic empirical attention devoted to the issue of proverb familiarity in this country or to the possibility that geographic differences might preclude establishing a single paremiological minimum that would be equally representative of proverb familiarity in diverse regions around the country. This article reviews the call for establishing a paremiological minimum for the United States and the relevant efforts to date. The article then summarizes the results of a study of proverb familiarity among college students in four different regions of the United States, presenting results from both a proverb familiarity rating task and a proverb generation task. These data make it possible to determine the relative familiarity of several hundred proverbs and to assess the possibility that familiarity with these proverbs varies across regions. The success of this approach is evidence that this type of nomothetic and quantitative analysis of folkloric material can be a useful complement to performance-oriented research. For example, the results suggest some limits to the verisimilitude of people’s intuitions as to the currency and familiarity of proverbial texts, as proverbs often listed as "common" were sometimes shown to be relatively unfamiliar (at least to contemporary college students). Further, although statistical analyses of the data did reveal that there may be some difference in absolute levels of familiarity across regions, it was also clear that the relative familiarity of various proverbs nonetheless shows strong stability from one region to another. In general, then, the data presented here provide clear evidence that proverbs familiar in one region of the United States can generally be expected to be familiar in other regions as well; this finding suggests that a truly national paremiological minimum may well be achievable.