Measuring Religious Experience: An Item Response Theory Analysis of Religious Experiences
Joe Chelladurai preprint
Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis, commonly used in educational testing, is applied here to a measure of religious experiences. Using Rasch and logistic models for dichotomous outcomes, the analysis finds that most items have low discriminatory power and low difficulty, except for one item measuring change resulting from religious experience. The paper demonstrates the utility of IRT for studying religion and spirituality.