Topic specific epistemic beliefs: Extending the Theory of Integrated Domains in Personal Epistemology

Combining Intra- and Interindividual Approaches in Epistemic Beliefs Research

“…Since the mid-2000s, a general consensus has emerged that epistemic beliefs can be conceptualized on different levels of specificity that interact with each other (Buehl et al, 2002;Muis et al, 2006Muis et al, , 2016. For example, according to the Theory of Integrated Domains in Epistemology (TIDE; Muis et al, 2006), individuals differ in their general epistemic beliefs, their domain-specific epistemic beliefs, and, following the framework's extension by Merk et al (2018), in their topic-specific epistemic beliefs. One individual might thus have different beliefs regarding psychology and biology (domain-specific beliefs).…”

“…In fact, students might deliberately choose a certain field of study that conforms with their general (i.e., domain-unspecific) epistemic beliefs because, for example, "students with strong beliefs in the certainty of knowledge may find fields that seem to be characterized by 'absolute, ' rather than tentative, knowledge to be more attractive" (Trautwein and Lüdtke, 2007, p. 352). This idea, which has been termed as the "self-selection hypothesis" (Trautwein and Lüdtke, 2007), may then explain why students from harder disciplines have higher absolute beliefs regarding scientific knowledge than students from softer disciplines: They might be inclined to choose a hard discipline for their studies (Trautwein and Lüdtke, 2007), and, according to the TIDE framework (Muis et al, 2016;Merk et al, 2018), their general beliefs affect their discipline-specific beliefs. More specifically, the TIDE framework suggests that different levels of epistemic beliefs are reciprocally influential (Muis et al, 2006).…”

“…What may be perceived as another limitation is that we only assessed epistemic beliefs at one level of specificity. When testing their extension of the TIDE framework, Merk et al (2018) however found that epistemic beliefs also vary over different topics within a specific discipline, and Muis and Gierus (2013) found that individuals' beliefs might vary within a domain depending on the specific context within a domain. Therefore, taking an even more fine-grained perspective might also prove worthwhile in future research.…”

“…the meta-analytic review by Greene et al, 2018). Moreover, considerable efforts have been put into investigating whether epistemic beliefs are domaingeneral or domain-specific, with a general consensus emerging that individuals hold beliefs on different levels (Buehl et al, 2002;Merk et al, 2018).…”

Smart but evil? Student-teachers perception of educational researchers’ epistemic trustworthiness.

“…However, despite several methodological strengths (e.g., the experimental variation of sources or the high construct validity of the measurements), there are three particular limitations that motivated us to undertake a conceptual replication of these findings (Simons, 2014) in the form of a preregistered (Nosek et al, 2015;van 't Veer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016) and, therefore, clearly confirmatory (Wagenmakers et al, 2012) study. First, in the field of epistemic beliefs, there is an emerging call for disentangling epistemic beliefs (and related constructs) of varying specificity and different contexts (Buehl & Alexander, 2006;Merk et al, 2018;Muis et al, 2006). However, Study 1 neglects this differentiation.…”