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

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.

Dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity among Christians and the religiously unaffiliated: A cross-cultural analysis based on the International Social Survey Programme

“…While the scales mentioned above are multidimensional, other authors have focused on a single dimension of religiosity. For example, the Supernatural Beliefs Scale (SBS) [21, 46, 47] was introduced “to measure the respondent’s tendency to believe in the existence or reality of supernatural entities, with minimal use of jargon from specific religions” (Jong and Halberstadt [21]). The original SBS consisted of ten items [46, 47] but was later reduced to six items for measuring respondents’ beliefs in God, angels and demons, soul, afterlife, existence of a spiritual realm and supernatural events (miracles).…”

“…For example, the Supernatural Beliefs Scale (SBS) [21, 46, 47] was introduced “to measure the respondent’s tendency to believe in the existence or reality of supernatural entities, with minimal use of jargon from specific religions” (Jong and Halberstadt [21]). The original SBS consisted of ten items [46, 47] but was later reduced to six items for measuring respondents’ beliefs in God, angels and demons, soul, afterlife, existence of a spiritual realm and supernatural events (miracles). The SBS-6 was developed to be cross-culturally applicable, by structuring the items in the form of simple propositions that can be modified for different religious contexts (Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh and Jainist populations) without introducing significant construct biases [21].…”

Death anxiety, exposure to death, mortuary preferences, and religiosity in five countries

“…The project for which this data was originally collected concerned the relationship between supernatural belief and death anxiety. Two of the scales included in these datasets were developed for the project: the Supernatural Belief Scale and the Existential Death Anxiety Scale, whose initial psychometric evaluations have been published elsewhere 10 – 12 , and will briefly be described below. This research was designed in accordance with the regulations of the Central University Research Ethics Committee (CUREC) of Oxford University, and the University of Otago Human Ethics Committee, and has been reviewed and approved by these bodies (Ref.…”

Moralization of Religiosity Explains Worldwide Trends in Religious Belief

“…We assessed moralization of religiosity using the measure we created and used in Study 2 (α3a = .88 α3b = .86, α3c = .85). We measured current religiosity using the Supernatural Belief Scale (SBS) [39], a cross-culturally validated measure of religious belief.…”

“…Measures. We assessed religiosity with the SBS [39] and moralization of religiosity with the measure we created and used in Studies 2 and 3. We measured implicit moral distrust of deconverts via a conjunction fallacy task [12].…”