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 (CitationWilliamson & 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.
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NOTES
01. As will be seen, we failed in the early stages of this research to anticipate the level of sensitivity that some of our Muslim participants would have concerning the English transliteration of the Qur'an as “Koran.” Even though some of our readers also may share this sensitivity, we beg their indulgence in our effort to be consistent when quoting survey items that used that spelling.
02. In his construction of the RWAS, CitationAltemeyer (1996) claimed that he did not write items designed to tap specific categories of his three-pronged definition of right-wing authoritarianism; consequently, most items overlap the categories. We have carefully assessed each item and suggested its identification with a category or categories to which it seems to best relate.