Are the Typologies Determined by the Post-Critical Belief Scale Predicted Well by the Religious Attitudes and Behaviour of Maltese Undergraduate Students英文文献资料.docVIP

Psychology 2011. Vol.2, No.5, 405-410 Copyright ? 2011 SciRes. DOI:10.4236/psych.2011.25063 Are the Typologies Determined by the Post-Critical Belief Scale Predicted Well by the Religious Attitudes and Behaviour of Maltese Undergraduate Students? Mary Anne Lauri , Josef Lauri , Joseph Borg 1 2 3 Department of Psychology, University of Malta, Msida, Malta; Department of Mathematics, University of Malta, Msida, Malta; 1 2 3 Department of Pastoral Theology and Canon Law, University of Malta, Msida, Malta. Email: mary-anne.lauri@.m th th th Received May 15 , 2011; revised June 29 , 2011; accepted July 29 , 2011. Religious beliefs play an important role in the study of religious practices and behaviour. Wulff (1997) sug- gested that there are four basic attitudes towards religion: Literal Affirmation, Literal Disaffirmation, Reductive Interpretation and Restorative Interpretation. Building on this work, Duriez, Soenans and Hutsebaut (2005) con- structed the Post-Critical Belief Scale (PCBS). In their work, Duriez at al. conducted a Principal Component Analysis of the responses to this questionnaire. It yielded two factors which partitioned 2-dimensional space into four quadrants corresponding to the four types of beliefs postulated by Wulff (1997). The research question which is addressed in this paper is whether there is an association between scores on the PCBS and religious practices and behaviour in a staunchly Catholic country like Malta where over 98% are baptized in the Roman Catholic Church. This question was addressed by administering a questionnaire to a random sample of 650 stu- dents at the University of Malta, of which 421 completed the questionnaire. Of those who answered the ques- tionnaire, 349 were undergraduates. The questionnaire consisted of a number of q