The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE): Evidence of Validity in the United States and India

Abstract

Researchers increasingly recognize that the mind and culture interact at many levels to constitute our lived experience, yet we know relatively little about the extent to which culture shapes the way people appraise their experiences and the likelihood that a given experience will be reported. Experiences that involve claims regarding deities, extraordinary abilities, and/or psychopathology offer an important site for investigating the interplay of mind and culture at the population level. Due to the siloing of research on experiences based on discipline-specific constructs, as well as the difficulties inherent in comparing culture-laden experiences, there are few tools that allow researchers to compare experiences across cultures. We introduce the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE), which allows researchers to do so by separating the phenomenological features of experiences from how they are appraised and querying both. It thereby offers a new means of investigating the potentially universal (etic) and culture-specific (emic) aspects of lived experiences. To ensure that the INOE survey items are understood as intended by English speakers in the US and Hindi speakers in India, and thus can serve as a basis for cross-cultural comparison, we used the Response Process Evaluation (RPE) method (Wolf et al., 2021) to collect evidence of item-level validity. Our inability to validate some items drawn from other surveys suggests that they are capturing a wider range of experiences than researchers intend. Wider use of the RPE method would increase the likelihood that survey results are due to the differences that researchers intend to measure.

The Response Process Evaluation Method

“…This type of validity evidence is often gathered by consulting experts or relevant literature (AERA, APA, NCME, 2014;Lissitz, 2009;Sireci, 1998) but this does not guarantee that the items are relevant to participants, especially when researchers seek to measure psychological properties that are more ontologically subjective or culturally specific. If researchers intend to use the survey instrument to make cross-cultural comparisons or administer the survey to participants from a different culture, then the entire RPE process should be repeated using participants from that group to ensure it is cross-culturally sound (for more information, see Wolf et al, 2022 andTaves et al, 2023).…”

“…For simplicity, we elect to demonstrate the validation process only for Englishspeaking Americans, but the process can be expanded to validate items simultaneously in multiple languages. Readers that are interested in detail about the cross-cultural validation process are referred to Taves et al (2023).…”