Hi,
I am looking for a scale to determine if participants are more prone to accept scientific or 'transcendental explanations to alternative therapies. My hypothesis is that if expectancies/beliefs and explanations provided are coherent, the alternative therapy will have a bigger effect.
Is there any validated tool to measure a similar construct? I am thinking about some scale containing items like 'science cannot explain everything', 'if a therapy is not scientifically tested, it should not be used', or 'some phenomena are beyond our understanding'.
Thanks!
What do you want to investigate? The attitude of the users or the success of the therapy? If you are looking for users, are you highly trained or lay users?
Hi Ivan,
Thank you for your reply.
I want to investigate the attitude of the users, so I can use it as a moderator in my study. The participants are just laypeople.
I do think there are scales like this. Just as you say. However, these scales should be assesed and it does depend on the theme. Those scales are available for the user. The answers are looked too. I wish I could find the names for this. Maybe under psychology, to the medical side.
Hope you have luck
Maybe it's not 100% what you're looking for - but i think the 10-item Belief in Science Scale by Farias et al., 2013 is really close to what you're trying to measure (Article Scientific faith: Belief in science increases in the face of...
).It measures the extent to which people believe in the superiority of science and the extent to which people believe science is an important and valuable social institution (Some items sound like the one you were talking about in your question: “Science provides us with a better understanding of the universe than does religion”).
Maybe you can check out all of the "Bullshit receptivity" stream of research as well (e.g. "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit, by Pennycook et al. 2015" - http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf ).
There's a nice debate around religiosity, spirituality and receptivity to pseudo-profound claims, we talk about it in our working paper (Article A Literature Review of Bullshit Receptivity: Implications fo...
)Hope it's useful!
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