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Measuring Cross-Cultural Supernatural Beliefs with Self- and Peer-Reports. Research data from the Croatian sample.

Personality Psychology

Authors(s) / Creator(s)





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.

Persistent Identifier

https://doi.org/10.5160/psychdata.bems99me29

Year of Publication

Funding

Partly supported by the Marsden Fund (13-UOO-224), administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand, granted to J. Halberstadt; German Research Foundation (DFG) and Ruprecht-Karls-Univerität Heidelberg within the funding programme Open Access Publishing

Citation

Bluemke, M., Jong, J., Grevenstein, D., Mikloušić, I. & Halberstadt, J. (2016). Measuring Cross-Cultural Supernatural Beliefs with Self- and Peer-Reports. Research data from the Croatian sample. (Version 1.0.0) [Data and Documentation]. Trier: Research Data Center at ZPID. https://doi.org/10.5160/psychdata.bems99me29

Study Description

Research Questions/Hypotheses:

Research Design:

Fully Standardized Survey Instrument (provides question formulation and answer options); single measurement

Measurement Instruments/Apparatus:

Supernatural Belief Scale (SBS). The SBS is a 10-item scale intended to measure cross-culturally recurring supernatural entities such as belief in high-order agents (God), low-order agents (angels), spiritual world (souls), afterlife conceptions (heaven), inexplicable events (miracles) and spiritual intermediaries (prophets); the present investigation focused on a Croatian translation of the original English SBS created in New Zealand (Jong, Bluemke, & Halberstadt, 2013).

Data Collection Method:

Data collection in the presence of an experimenter

Data collection in the absence of an experimenter

Population:

Croatian college students and relatives, friends, peers

Survey Time Period:

Sample:

Convenience sample

Gender Distribution:

69% female subjects (n=443)
29.6% male subjects (n=190)
1.4% missing values (undetermined) (n=9)

Age Distribution: 18-50 years

Spatial Coverage (Country/Region/City): Croatia

Subject Recruitment:

Sample Size:

642 individuals

Return/Drop Out:

bems99me29_readme.txt
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bems99me29_fd.txt
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Sharing Level 1 (Scientific Use)
Description: Research data file of the study
bems99me29_kb.txt
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Description: Codebook of the research data file bems99me29_fd.txt