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

Matthias Bluemke,Jamin Halberstadt,Igor Mikloušić,Jonathan Jong,Dennis Grevenstein,Jelte M Wicherts

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0164291

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.

Highlights

There has, in the past two decades, been burgeoning interest in the scientific study of religion as a psychological universal
The current research focuses on the assumption of measurement invariance when assessing supernatural belief: (a) We test the translatability and cross-cultural applicability of the Supernatural Belief Scale” (SBS), taking two “Western” countries–one from the Northern, one from the Southern Hemisphere– as a starting point; (b) we provide stringent evidence for its convergent validity in terms of selfpeer-agreement; to do so (c) we present a new measurement invariance testing strategy that accommodates the dependent nature of self- and peer-data
The first step concerned an inconspicuous test with confirmatory factor analytic approach (CFA) run on the Croatian data to ascertain whether or not the same measurement models provided as good fit to the Croatian SBS as to the original SBS

Summary

Introduction

There has, in the past two decades, been burgeoning interest in the scientific study of religion as a psychological universal In this time, many testable theories about the cognitive and evolutionary underpinnings of religious belief and behavior have been proposed. Many testable theories about the cognitive and evolutionary underpinnings of religious belief and behavior have been proposed It is argued, for example, that the belief in supernatural agents emerged out of a hypersensitive tendency to detect agents in our surrounding environments [1, 2] and our ability to impute rich mental states to agents [3]. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0164291 October 19, 2016

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