Supernatural Belief Scale (SBS) - German Version

Abstract

The 10-item scale measures the tendency to believe in supernatural entities such as immaterial agents, afterlife/otherworld places, and miraculous earthly events. The scale is intended to be a valid indicator of the cognitive component of religiosity, capturing ten cross-cultural beliefs that appear as religious themes in various religious contexts in the world. The scale was first tested in English by Jong, Bluemke, & Halberstadt (2013). The SBS aims to be applicable to people of different religious standing (atheists and believers alike), across various countries, with a multitude of religious backgrounds, if necessary by adapting the labels pertaining to the supernatural entities, while not altering the essence of the item content or response format. After its seminal application in New Zealand, and later in Croatia, among student samples with mostly a Christian cultural background, it was applied in Germany, yielding good reliability, a replicable factor structure, and cross-cultural measurement invariance (strict invariance across Germans and New Zealanders). The scale showed signs of construct validity and criterion validity in all samples (NZ, CRO, GER).