Survey Research and Islamic Fundamentalism: A Question about Validity

Abstract

Psychology of religion research has historically borrowed heavily from the quantitative approach of mainstream psychology. This study illustrates difficulties that are sometimes related to this practice, even when using instruments that have proven to be psychometrically sound. We distributed an earlier reliable and valid version of the Intratextual Fundamentalism Scale (Williamson & Hood, 2005), developed with a U.S. Christian sample, in an African American mosque for the purpose of cross-cultural validation. Among the 76 survey booklets initially distributed, 27 were returned and, of those, only 17 had usable information; almost all of these had aberrations including item omissions and handwritten comments. In view of the low response rate and atypical responses, this article presents a qualitative-type, rather than a quantitative, analysis of the data and discusses the important issue of assumed validity as it relates to contemporary religious research in cross-cultural investigations.