Essay on a Set Topic: Introduction to the Psychology of Religion

Institution: University of Birmingham, School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion, Department of Theology and Religion
Module: 09 38204 Introduction to the Psychology of Religion, Certificate Level, 20 credits, Semester 2, 2026/27
Assessment item: 38204-03, the 2,000-word essay on a set topic, the 70 percent component
Module lead: Dr Carissa Sharp
Length: 2,000 words, with the reference list excluded from the count
Referencing: Cite Them Right Harvard, as used across the College of Arts and Law
Submission: through the module Canvas assignment point by 12 noon on Monday of the Semester 2 assessment week
Teaching: 20 lecture hours, 10 seminar hours and 170 hours of guided independent study across 200 notional hours

Assessment Context

University of Birmingham runs 09 38204 Introduction to the Psychology of Religion as a Certificate Level module of 20 credits in the Department of Theology and Religion, taught in Semester 2 with Dr Carissa Sharp as module lead. The 2,000-word essay on a set topic carries 70 percent of the module mark, and a 1,000-word reflection essay on readings carries the remaining 30 percent. Both components are coursework. Reassessment follows the failed component where that failure causes the module as a whole to be failed. The module handbook records 20 lecture hours, 10 seminar hours and 170 hours of guided independent study, which totals 200 notional hours.

Course content covers the interdisciplinary study of psychology and religion, with attention to the history of the field and to figures such as William James, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The handbook names social context, the position of the scholar or researcher, the methods used in the field, and current directions in research. Named topic areas include religious and spiritual experience, religious development, non-religion, and the personal and social outcomes of religion and spirituality. Four learning outcomes govern the essay: assess the significance of key figures, engage with the importance of social context and researcher position, demonstrate understanding of methods, and show knowledge of current trends.

Those four outcomes set the shape of a good answer. A first-year essay that summarises what James, Freud and Jung each said about religion satisfies the first outcome and leaves the other three untouched. The module lead expects students to read psychology and theology as disciplines with different norms, and to notice where a psychological method carries an assumption that a theologian would refuse. Choose a topic that lets you do that work rather than one that invites a parade of famous names.

Essay Topics

Answer one topic from the list. Print the full topic at the head of the essay.

1. Assess the claim that the psychology of religion inherits its central questions from William James and its central suspicions from Sigmund Freud. Argue what each figure contributes to the field today and what each obscures.
2. Explain how the social position of the researcher shapes what counts as data in the psychology of religion. Use at least two empirical studies to show what changes when the sample changes.
3. Evaluate one method used in the psychology of religion, such as self-report questionnaire, experience sampling, interview or implicit measure. State what the method can establish and what it cannot.
4. Argue whether the psychology of religion can study non-religion without treating non-religion as the absence of something. Draw on empirical work and on the discipline’s history.
5. Assess the evidence for a link between religion or spirituality and one outcome, such as well-being, health or prejudice. Explain why the size and direction of the association varies across studies.

Requirements

1. State the argument in the first 200 words. A topic restated is not an argument, and a conclusion that introduces a new claim has not closed one.
2. Define the psychological terms you use at first use. Religion, religiosity, spirituality, intrinsic orientation and religious commitment are not interchangeable, and the difference between them decides what a study can measure.
3. Report empirical findings with the sample beside them. Give the number of participants, the population and the country, because a result from United States undergraduates cannot carry a general claim about religion.
4. Engage with the researcher’s position where the topic requires it. Name what the study design assumes about its participants and what the author’s own commitments appear to be.
5. Use at least eight scholarly sources, five of them peer reviewed and published since 2015. Textbooks and lecture slides may support definitions, not arguments. Wikipedia, revision sites and commercial essay banks are not sources.
6. Distinguish correlation from causation where a study only supports association. Claims that religion causes better health require longitudinal or experimental evidence, and most of the literature offers neither.
7. Keep the register psychological when you discuss theology and theological when you discuss psychology. The module exists to teach you to move between the two without collapsing them.
8. Follow Cite Them Right Harvard for in-text citation and the reference list. Give page numbers for direct quotation.

Suggested Structure

Section 1: Topic, Claim and Scope

Approximately 250 words. Identify the topic, state the claim, define the key terms and indicate which evidence will carry the argument.

Section 2: The Field’s Inheritance

Approximately 500 words. Set out the historical position the topic requires, whether that is James on experience, Freud on projection or the shift toward measurement and cognitive accounts.

Section 3: Evidence and Method

Approximately 600 words. Present two or three empirical studies in detail, with samples and measures, and say what each can and cannot support.

Section 4: Context and Critique

Approximately 400 words. Assess the role of social context and researcher position, and name the strongest objection to your claim.

Section 5: Conclusion

Approximately 250 words. Restate the finding, state its limits and say what evidence would change your mind. The reference list begins on a new page.

Assessment Overview

Marking Criteria

Marks follow the University of Birmingham undergraduate scale. Bands below describe what separates one outcome from the next on this essay.

Submission and Feedback

Submit through the Canvas assignment point before the deadline, with the word count on the first page. Birmingham applies a penalty for late submission under the College of Arts and Law policy, and extensions are arranged through the School office with supporting evidence rather than by email to the module lead. Turnitin runs on submission and the similarity report is read for copied prose and for writing patterns consistent with generated text. Marking is against the criteria above. Feedback returns as an annotated script with a completed criteria sheet and two priorities for the next essay. The reference list sits outside the word count, and in-text citations sit inside it.

Academic Integrity

Submit original work and cite every claim that comes from a source. Unattributed paraphrase is treated as plagiarism in the same way as unacknowledged quotation. Reusing material from another module requires a different topic and a stated relationship to the earlier work. Report statistical results exactly as the source gives them, since a rounded number or a dropped sample size can misrepresent what a study found. Do not upload module materials or seminar notes to commercial study sites.

Learning Materials and References

Johnson, K.A., Moon, J.W., VanderWeele, T.J., Schnitker, S. and Johnson, B.R. (2024) ‘Assessing religion and spirituality in a cross-cultural sample: development of religion and spirituality items for the Global Flourishing Study’, Religion, Brain and Behavior, 14(4), pp. 345-358. doi:10.1080/2153599X.2023.2217245.

Leite, A., Nobre, B. and Dias, P. (2023) ‘Religious identity, religious practice, and religious beliefs across countries and world regions’, Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 45(2), pp. 107-132. doi:10.1177/00846724221150024.

Maraldi, E. and Farias, M. (2020) ‘Assessing implicit spirituality in a non-WEIRD population: development and validation of an implicit measure of New Age and paranormal beliefs’, The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 30(2), pp. 101-111. doi:10.1080/10508619.2019.1661198.

Santana, L.H. (2026) ‘Mind, nature, and religious experience in William James and Carl Gustav Jung’, Review of General Psychology. doi:10.1177/10892680251390273.

Saroglou, V., Clobert, M., Cohen, A.B., Johnson, K.A., Ladd, K.L. and Van Pachterbeke, M. (2020) ‘Believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging: the cognitive, emotional, moral, and social dimensions of religiousness across cultures’, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 51(7-8), pp. 551-575. doi:10.1177/0022022120946488.

Verification note. The module code, title, School and Department, Certificate Level, 20 credit value, Semester 2 delivery, module lead, contact hours totalling 200 notional hours, description, four learning outcomes, and the two assessed components weighted at 30 and 70 percent with word counts of 1,000 and 2,000 words are published in the University of Birmingham Programmes and Modules Handbook for the 2026/27 session, and the same entry appears for 2025/26. The five essay topics and the submission deadline are constructed for this brief because the public handbook prints no topic list and no date. Cite Them Right Harvard is the style the College of Arts and Law commonly applies, so confirm both the style and the deadline with the module lead in the first lecture. The Santana entry gives a DOI and year without a settled volume and issue at the time of writing, so check the final pagination before submission.

Model Essay: Measuring Religion, Missing the Person

A strong answer to topic three picks one method and shows what it costs. Self-report questionnaires dominate the field because they are cheap, fast and portable across languages, and the price of that convenience is that they measure what a person is willing to say about themselves in a survey frame. The four-dimensional model of religiousness offers a useful test case, since believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging were distinguished across fifteen countries with 3,218 participants, and the four factors behaved differently by cultural zone (Saroglou et al. 2020, 551). Belonging and behaving clustered with authoritarianism and low openness in some settings, while believing and bonding tracked spirituality in secular Western samples. The finding matters for a first-year essay because it shows a single questionnaire score doing very different work in different places. Students who treat a scale as a direct read-out of religious life miss the point of the module. A method section should therefore name the construct, name the instrument and say what the instrument cannot reach.

Cultural measurement comes before cultural comparison, and the recent literature is blunt about the sequencing. Leite, Nobre and Dias tested measurement invariance for religious identity, practice and beliefs across six world regions and found that full metric invariance held in some regions and failed across the WEIRD and non-WEIRD split (Leite, Nobre and Dias 2023, 107). Their conclusion is narrower than it first appears, since a factor structure that shifts between regions cannot support a league table of national piety. For the essay, that result supports an argument about method rather than an argument about religion. Johnson and colleagues make the practical version of the same point, reporting cognitive interviews with 230 participants across 22 countries and recommending shorter scales, defined terms and explicit options for people who do not believe in God (Johnson et al. 2024, 345). Taken together, these studies let a student claim something specific: the field’s instruments carry cultural assumptions, and those assumptions are testable rather than merely regrettable.

Where Samples Do the Work

A second source of marks sits in the sample descriptions that weaker essays compress into a single clause. Maraldi and Farias built an implicit association test for New Age and paranormal beliefs in a Brazilian sample of 615 respondents and found a stronger implicit and explicit correlation than studies with WEIRD populations usually report (Maraldi and Farias 2020, 101). Their design choice is the point: an implicit measure responds to a different question than a Likert item, and the Brazilian sample removes the assumption that findings from North American undergraduates travel. Set that beside the cross-cultural questionnaire work and a pattern appears. Method and sample move together, and a claim is only as wide as the pair that produced it. First-year essays lose marks by reporting a finding without the population behind it, which reads as confidence but functions as vagueness. Report the number, the country and the recruitment route, then say what the result licenses.

Key Figures or Living Questions

Students often ask whether the essay should be organised around James, Freud and Jung or around a problem, and the answer depends on the topic chosen. Santana’s comparison of mind, nature, and religious experience in William James and Carl Gustav Jung shows why a figures-first structure can still be analytical (Santana 2026). James moved from a supernaturalist phenomenology toward a religious naturalism grounded in radical empiricism, while Jung kept a careful distinction between psychological and metaphysical reality, and the two commitments produced different methods for the same subject. That is a comparison a marker can grade, because it says what each figure’s ontology allowed them to study. A biographical sequence of James then Freud then Jung invites summary and earns a mid-band mark. Four checks separate the two approaches:

1. The essay names what each figure assumed about the status of religious claims, not only what each concluded.
2. Every historical claim connects to a live question in the field today.
3. At least one empirical study appears beside each historical figure.
4. The conclusion answers the topic as printed, in the same terms.

Freud is the hardest of the three to handle well, because the reductionist reading is easy to state and easy to overstate. Treat his account of religion as a hypothesis with testable consequences, then ask whether the evidence supports it.

Correlation and the Well-Being Claim

The most common substantive error in this module is a causal claim built on cross-sectional data. A questionnaire administered once can show that religious attenders report higher life satisfaction; it cannot show that attending produced the satisfaction, and reverse causation or a third factor such as social support explains the association just as well. Saroglou and colleagues add a further complication, since believing predicted lower life satisfaction through a high existential quest orientation while bonding and belonging predicted higher satisfaction through agreeableness and extraversion (Saroglou et al. 2020, 568). One construct, three directions, all in the same dataset. Students who write that religion improves well-being have flattened that result into a slogan. Write instead that the association depends on which dimension is measured and which mediator is modelled, then say what design would settle the question. Longitudinal and cross-cultural designs do exist, and the cross-cultural item development work shows how much care a comparable measure takes before it can be used.

Conclusion

Pick the topic early, because the field’s history and its methods pull in different directions and one essay cannot carry both at full weight. Read two empirical papers properly rather than eight papers quickly, and write down the sample size and the measure for each one before drafting anything. Keep a working definition of religion on the page and use the same definition throughout, since drifting between religion, religiosity and spirituality is the quietest way to lose marks on the methods criterion. When a study reports an association, write the sentence as an association and resist the extra verb that turns it into a cause. The 1,000-word reflection runs first in the semester, so treat it as practice for the voice the essay needs. Check the Harvard entries against Cite Them Right and confirm the submission date with the module lead in week one.

Essay Topic 3: Evaluate One Method Used in the Psychology of Religion: Self-Report Questionnaires

Institution: University of Birmingham, School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion
Module: 09 38204 Introduction to the Psychology of Religion
Assessment: 38204-03, Essay on a Set Topic
Word count: Approximately 1,800 words, excluding references
Referencing style: Cite Them Right Harvard

Evaluating Self-Report Questionnaires in the Psychology of Religion: What They Measure and What They Miss

Introduction

Self-report questionnaires remain among the most widely used methods in the psychology of religion because they allow researchers to examine personal beliefs, religious practices, spiritual experiences and attitudes across large populations. The method involves asking participants to describe their thoughts, feelings and behaviours through structured questions, usually with fixed response options or rating scales. Researchers can then compare responses, identify patterns and examine relationships between religious commitment and other psychological characteristics. However, measuring religion presents particular difficulties because religious identity and experience involve personal interpretations that may not fit easily into standardised questions. A person who attends religious services regularly, for example, may not hold strong religious beliefs, while someone who rarely participates in organised worship may consider spirituality central to their identity.

Religiosity refers to an individual’s relationship with religious beliefs, practices and institutions, whereas spirituality generally concerns experiences of meaning, connection or engagement with what a person regards as sacred or transcendent. Although these concepts overlap, researchers cannot treat them as interchangeable measures. This essay argues that self-report questionnaires provide a valuable method for studying the psychological dimensions of religion, particularly when researchers examine large and culturally diverse populations. However, their findings remain dependent on how researchers define religiosity, construct survey questions and interpret participants’ responses. Evidence from cross-cultural studies demonstrates that questionnaire items do not always carry the same meaning across societies. Consequently, researchers should combine careful questionnaire design, cultural validation and complementary research methods rather than treat self-reported answers as complete accounts of religious life.

The Role of Self-Report Questionnaires in the Psychology of Religion

The psychology of religion examines how religious beliefs, experiences and practices relate to human thought, emotion and behaviour. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) helped establish the importance of examining personal religious experiences rather than limiting the study of religion to institutional teachings. His approach placed individual accounts at the centre of psychological investigation. Although James relied heavily on personal narratives and published accounts, his interest in subjective experience remains relevant to contemporary questionnaire research. Both approaches recognise that religious experience involves personal meanings that researchers cannot observe directly.

Self-report questionnaires extend this interest through standardised measurement. Researchers may ask participants how frequently they pray, whether they believe in life after death, how strongly they identify with a religious tradition or whether spiritual experiences influence their decisions. Responses can be converted into numerical scores for statistical analysis. A Likert scale, for example, may ask participants to indicate their level of agreement with a statement ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Such measurements allow researchers to examine differences between individuals and identify relationships between religious commitment and psychological outcomes.

The method also offers practical advantages. Large surveys can collect information from thousands of participants across different countries without requiring researchers to conduct lengthy interviews with every respondent. Saroglou et al. (2020) demonstrate the value of this approach through their investigation of four dimensions of religiousness: believing, bonding, behaving and belonging. Their study involved 3,218 participants across 14 countries representing different religious traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism or Taoism. The researchers found that religiousness involved distinct cognitive, emotional, moral and social dimensions rather than a single general characteristic.

The findings support the use of questionnaires for identifying patterns that might remain difficult to establish through individual interviews. Nevertheless, they also reveal a fundamental measurement problem. A questionnaire that combines belief, worship attendance and religious identity into one overall score may overlook important differences between participants. Someone may maintain a strong emotional connection to a religious community without accepting all its teachings. Another person may hold firm religious convictions but rarely attend communal worship. Researchers therefore need to identify precisely which dimension of religion they intend to measure.

What Questionnaires Can Establish: Evidence from Cross-Cultural Research

Cross-cultural research provides a useful test of questionnaire reliability because religious language and practice acquire meaning within particular social environments. A questionnaire developed in a predominantly Christian society may contain assumptions that do not apply to Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or non-religious populations. The same question about prayer, for instance, may produce different interpretations depending on whether prayer involves individual reflection, communal worship or prescribed daily practices.

Leite, Nobre and Dias (2023) examined this problem through a study of religious identity, religious practice and religious beliefs. Their research used data from 36,026 adults across 27 countries, drawn from the 2018 International Social Survey Programme. The researchers examined whether questionnaire items measured the same underlying dimensions across six world regions. Their analysis identified three related but distinct dimensions: religious identity, religious practice and religious beliefs. However, the results did not establish full measurement equivalence between WEIRD and non-WEIRD populations. In particular, the researchers found that the three dimensions did not demonstrate full metric or scalar invariance across these broad cultural groups (Leite, Nobre and Dias, 2023).

Measurement invariance refers to the extent to which an instrument measures the same psychological construct across different groups. Without sufficient invariance, researchers cannot assume that identical questionnaire scores represent equivalent levels of religiosity in different societies. For example, a person who identifies as spiritual but not religious may interpret a survey differently from someone whose religious identity depends on participation in an established institution. The distinction matters because a numerical difference between two populations may reflect differences in interpretation rather than differences in religious commitment.

Lemos et al. (2019) provide further evidence through their examination of religiousness across 26 countries with Christian historical traditions. Their study analysed International Social Survey Programme data from the 1998 and 2008 religion surveys, using exploratory and multi-group confirmatory factor analyses. The researchers identified three dimensions: beliefs in the afterlife and miracles, belief in God and the importance of God, and religious involvement. Their findings supported the possibility of identifying common dimensions across religiously affiliated and unaffiliated populations, although some measurement differences remained between countries. The authors also acknowledged that the original survey structure and the coding of particular questions limited the comparisons researchers could make.

These findings illustrate both the value and the limitations of standardised measurement. Large datasets allow researchers to investigate religious patterns across national boundaries, but the quality of comparisons depends on the suitability of the questions. A questionnaire cannot establish cultural equivalence simply because researchers translate its wording into several languages.

The Problem of Personal Interpretation and Researcher Position

Self-report questionnaires depend on participants’ willingness and ability to describe their experiences accurately. However, individuals may interpret questions differently, forget particular experiences or provide answers that reflect social expectations. Social desirability bias occurs when participants give responses that they believe others will approve of rather than responses that accurately represent their attitudes or behaviour. Religious questions may be especially vulnerable to this problem in communities where religious participation carries strong social expectations.

For example, a participant living in a society where regular worship attendance receives public approval may report greater religious involvement than their actual behaviour supports. Conversely, individuals in strongly secular environments may feel uncomfortable expressing religious beliefs. Such responses do not necessarily indicate deliberate dishonesty. They may reflect the influence of social relationships, personal identity and the circumstances in which researchers collect information.

Maraldi and Farias (2020) offer an important example of why researchers should not rely exclusively on explicit self-report. Their study examined implicit spirituality through the development of an Implicit Association Test measuring New Age and paranormal beliefs. The research involved 615 participants from the general Brazilian population, of whom 65.2% were male, with a mean age of 36.5 years. The researchers found a positive relationship between implicit associations and self-reported beliefs and spiritual practices, reporting a correlation of (r = .45), (p < .001). Their findings also indicated that the implicit measure could distinguish between believers and sceptics.

The study demonstrates that different measurement methods may capture related but distinct aspects of personal belief. Participants’ explicit answers provide information about what they consciously report, whereas an implicit measure examines associations through response patterns. Neither method offers a complete account of an individual’s spirituality. Moreover, an implicit association should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of a hidden belief that the participant consciously rejects. The findings instead support the use of complementary methods when researchers investigate complex psychological experiences.

Researcher position also matters. A scholar’s religious background, theoretical commitments and assumptions about spirituality may influence which questions they consider important. A researcher who understands religion primarily through organised institutions may place greater emphasis on worship attendance and religious membership. Someone who approaches religion through individual experience may prioritise personal meaning, transcendence and spiritual identity. Neither perspective automatically invalidates the research. However, researchers should explain their conceptual choices and provide evidence that their instruments represent the population under investigation.

Improving Questionnaire Design and Measurement Quality

Recent developments in cross-cultural research demonstrate that researchers can address some of these problems before administering large surveys. Johnson et al. (2024) describe the development of religion and spirituality measures for the Global Flourishing Study. Their research included cognitive interviews with 230 participants across 22 religiously diverse countries. Participants assessed preliminary questionnaire items, allowing researchers to examine whether individuals understood the questions as intended. The study also incorporated feedback from more than 130 scholars and several rounds of expert review.

Cognitive interviewing allows researchers to examine how participants understand particular questions rather than assuming that the wording communicates the intended meaning. For example, researchers may ask participants to explain what they understand by the terms religion, spirituality or religious discrimination. Their answers can reveal misunderstandings that conventional statistical analysis might not identify. The Global Flourishing Study illustrates how researchers can use participant feedback to improve the cultural suitability of survey instruments before collecting data on a much larger scale.

Toscanelli et al. (2022) provide another relevant example through their international examination of the Duke University Religion Index (DUREL). Their research translated the instrument into 20 languages and assessed its measurement properties across 27 nations. The researchers also examined its structure in Namibia, including a separate investigation involving three languages. Their findings supported the use of different measurement structures across several national samples, although the preferred structure varied between countries. In some populations, the data supported a two-factor model, while other countries showed better results with a single-factor structure.

The findings suggest that researchers should not assume that an established questionnaire will perform equally well in every population. Translation represents only one part of the process. Researchers must also examine cultural meaning, participant characteristics, reliability and construct validity. Construct validity concerns whether an instrument genuinely measures the psychological concept it claims to measure. A questionnaire may produce consistent scores without accurately representing religious commitment, spiritual experience or another intended construct.

Flake and Fried (2020) reinforce this concern in their examination of questionable measurement practices in psychology. They argue that researchers must explain how they define constructs, select instruments, calculate scores and modify existing scales. Their analysis highlights the danger of presenting numerical results without sufficient information about the decisions that produced them. In the psychology of religion, these concerns apply directly to studies that combine several religious indicators into a single measure without establishing that the indicators represent the same underlying construct.

A stronger research design should therefore include clearly defined concepts, appropriate sampling procedures and evidence of measurement validity. Researchers should also provide opportunities for participants to express uncertainty or identify with neither religious nor spiritual categories. Such options reduce the risk of forcing respondents into classifications that do not reflect their experiences.

The Limits of Self-Report and the Value of Mixed Methods

Despite its limitations, rejecting self-report questionnaires would remove an important source of evidence from psychological research. Personal beliefs and experiences are often difficult to observe directly, and participants remain important sources of information about their own psychological lives. Questionnaires also allow researchers to test hypotheses, compare groups and investigate associations that smaller qualitative studies may not identify.

However, researchers must distinguish between what questionnaire data establish and what they cannot establish. A cross-sectional survey can demonstrate an association between religious commitment and reported well-being, but it cannot independently establish that religion caused an improvement in psychological health. Reverse causation, social support and other personal circumstances may explain the relationship.

Hoogeveen et al. (2023) illustrate this problem through their many-analysts study of religiosity and well-being. Their research used data from 10,535 participants across 24 countries and involved 120 research teams examining the same dataset. Almost all teams identified a positive association between individual religiosity and self-reported well-being, although the estimated relationships varied across analytical approaches. The researchers also identified differences in how teams selected and constructed their measures.

The study is particularly important because it shows that measurement and analysis decisions influence research conclusions even when investigators use the same underlying dataset. Researchers may select different questionnaire items, construct different religiosity scores or control for different variables. Such decisions can affect the strength and interpretation of reported relationships.

Combining questionnaires with interviews, observation or experience-sampling methods may provide a fuller account of religious life. Interviews can explore the personal meanings behind survey responses, while observation may reveal how religious practices operate within communities. Experience sampling can also record thoughts and emotions closer to the time they occur, reducing dependence on long-term memory. Nevertheless, mixed methods require careful planning because different instruments may examine different aspects of the same phenomenon.

Conclusion

Self-report questionnaires provide a valuable but incomplete method for studying religion within psychology. Their ability to collect standardised information from large populations allows researchers to examine religious beliefs, personal identity, spiritual practices and psychological outcomes. Cross-cultural studies by Saroglou et al. (2020), Leite, Nobre and Dias (2023), and Lemos et al. (2019) demonstrate that questionnaires can identify meaningful dimensions of religiousness, although differences in cultural interpretation restrict some comparisons.

The evidence also shows that questionnaire responses depend on how researchers define religious constructs and how participants understand the questions. Social desirability, personal interpretation and researcher assumptions may influence the information that surveys produce. Recent work on cognitive interviewing and international scale validation demonstrates that researchers can address some of these difficulties through careful instrument development and cultural testing.

Self-report questionnaires should therefore remain an important method in the psychology of religion, but researchers should interpret their findings as accounts of reported beliefs and experiences rather than complete representations of religious life. Their strongest contribution emerges when researchers establish construct validity, examine cultural differences and combine numerical findings with evidence from other methods. Future research would benefit from greater participation among underrepresented religious and non-religious populations, particularly in societies where existing psychological measures have received limited validation. Such work would help establish whether current instruments capture religious experience across different social and cultural settings.

References

All references below are scholarly publications. The list includes peer-reviewed research published between 2019 and 2025, alongside the methodological literature used in the essay.

Cowden, R.G., Skinstad, D., Lomas, T., Johnson, B.R. and VanderWeele, T.J. (2025) ‘Measuring wellbeing in the Global Flourishing Study: insights from a cross-national analysis of cognitive interviews from 22 countries’, Quality & Quantity, 59, pp. 575–597. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-024-01947-1.

Flake, J.K. and Fried, E.I. (2020) ‘Measurement schmeasurement: questionable measurement practices and how to avoid them’, Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3(4), pp. 456–465. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245920952393.

Hoogeveen, S. et al. (2023) ‘A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being’, Religion, Brain & Behavior, 13(3), pp. 237–283. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2022.2070255.

Johnson, K.A., Moon, J.W., VanderWeele, T.J., Schnitker, S. and Johnson, B.R. (2024) ‘Assessing religion and spirituality in a cross-cultural sample: development of religion and spirituality items for the Global Flourishing Study’, Religion, Brain & Behavior, 14(4), pp. 345–358. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2023.2217245.

Leite, Â., Nobre, B. and Dias, P. (2023) ‘Religious identity, religious practice, and religious beliefs across countries and world regions’, Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 45(2), pp. 107–132. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00846724221150024.

Lemos, C.M., Gore, R.J., Puga-Gonzalez, I. and Shults, F.L. (2019) ‘Dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity among Christians and the religiously unaffiliated: a cross-cultural analysis based on the International Social Survey Programme’, PLOS ONE, 14(5), e0216352. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0216352.

Maraldi, E. and Farias, M. (2020) ‘Assessing implicit spirituality in a non-WEIRD population: development and validation of an implicit measure of New Age and paranormal beliefs’, The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 30(2), pp. 101–111. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10508619.2019.1661198.

Saroglou, V., Clobert, M., Cohen, A.B., Johnson, K.A., Ladd, K.L. and Van Pachterbeke, M. et al. (2020) ‘Believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging: the cognitive, emotional, moral, and social dimensions of religiousness across cultures’, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 51(7–8), pp. 551–575. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022120946488.

Toscanelli, C., Shino, E., Robinson, S.L. and Thalmayer, A.G. (2022) ‘Religiousness worldwide: translation of the Duke University Religion Index into 20 languages and validation across 27 nations’, Measurement Instruments for the Social Sciences, 4(1), Article e11133. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s42409-022-00041-2.

James, W. (1902) The varieties of religious experience: a study in human nature. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.