The Supernatural Belief Scale (SBS) is a measure of the respondents' tendency or disposition to believe in supernatural objects, including agents, places, and events. The SBS is designed to be essentially unidimensional, and initial psychometric analyses support this factor structure. Although it was initially designed in a Western Christian context, it has since been adapted for cross-cultural use, and has been translated into over a dozen languages.
The SBS generally avoids the use of culturally-specific labels. When it does, a more generic description or definition is used. Consider the following item:
There exists an all-powerful, all-knowing spiritual being, whom we might call God.
The descriptive part (italicised above) provides a definition of the object in question, whereas the label (underlined above) provides a culturally-specific label.
There are two versions of the SBS, as follows:
SBS-10
The Supernatural Belief Scale (SBS-10; Jong et al., 2013) is an essentially unidimensional measure designed and validated to measure individuals' tendencies to believe in supernatural agents, entities, and events. The SBS-10 is to be presented in fixed order. For the German and Croatian version of the SBS-10, and other information about translating the SBS, please contact me. The SBS-6 (below) is the version recommended for cross-cultural research.
The reference for the SBS-10 is:
Jong, J., Bluemke, M., & Halberstadt, J. (2013). Fear of death and supernatural beliefs: developing a new Supernatural Belief Scale to test the relationship. European Journal of Personality, 27, 495—506.
SBS-6
The SBS-6 is adapted for cross-cultural use. It has marginally weaker predictive power than the SBS-10, but should be used particularly for non-Abrahamic contexts. The SBS-6 is to be presented in fixed order.
The SBS-6 has also been translated into various other languages. If you would like to help to improve these translation or generate new ones, please get in touch!
Japanese (Hiragana) SBS (v. 1, as used in Jong & Halberstadt, 2016; Jong et al., 2019)
Japanese (Hiragana) SBS (v. 2)
The reference for the SBS-6 is:
Jong, J., & Halberstadt, J. (2016). Death anxiety and religious belief: an existential psychology of religion. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
There are also several open-access datasets available containing the SBS:
Jong, J., Halberstadt, J., Bluemke, M., Kavanagh, C., & Jackson, C. (2019). Death anxiety, exposure to death, mortuary preferences, and religiosity in five countries. Scientific Data, 6(1), 1-5.
Jong, J., Baimel, A., Ross, R., McKay, R., Bluemke, M., & Halberstadt, J. (2020). Traumatic life experiences and religiosity in eight countries. Scientific Data, 7(1), 1-8.