On this page, you will find information on my Supernatural Belief Scales, the Existential Death Anxiety Scale, and various implicit measures of religious belief.
Scales
Supernatural Belief Scale
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:
Supernatural Belief Scale (6 items)
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.
Supernatural Belief Scale (10 items)
The Supernatural Belief Scale (Jong et al., 2013) is an essentially unidimensional measure designed and validated to measure individuals' tendencies to believe in supernatural agents, entities, and events. It is primarily intended for use in Christian, Muslim. and Jewish contexts, 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 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.
Existential Death Anxiety Scale
The Existential Death Anxiety Scale is a 12-item measure with a two-factor structure. The first factor is General Death Anxiety (GDA); the second factor is Existential Death Anxiety (EDA). Existential death anxiety is essentially the fear of not existing. These two factors are highly correlated. The EDAS may be used as a single 12-item measure, or two 6-item measures.
Download psychometric information
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.
Implicit Measures
Supernatural Belief Single-target Implicit Association Test
The Supernatural Belief ST-IAT (Jong et al., 2012) is a single-target IAT, designed and validated for measuring implicit associations between religious concepts and existential concepts. Items in the SB ST-IAT were based on the SBS above.
Download SB ST-IAT instructions here. For Javascript code for Qualtrics, please contact me.
The SB ST-IAT is also described here:
Jong, J., & Halberstadt, J. (2016). Death anxiety and religious belief: an existential psychology of religion. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
Supernatural Belief Property Verification Task
The Supernatural Belief PVT (Jong et al., 2012) is a simple classification task, in which participants classical supernatural entities as either real or imaginary.
Download SB PVT instructions here
The SB PVT is also described here:
Jong, J., & Halberstadt, J. (2016). Death anxiety and religious belief: an existential psychology of religion. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.