Top-down puri®cation of Tobacyk's Revised Paranormal Belief Scale (original) (raw)
Using mostly undergraduate student data (N = 560), factor analysis con®rmed the existence of seven factors in Tobacyk's Revised Paranormal Belief Scale (RPBS). However, this replication proved to be of dubious value since (1) the factor structure was signi®cantly aected by age and gender; (2) the items in Tobacyk's original factors were signi®cantly non-additive; (3) the items showed pervasive dierential item functioning (DIF) related to respondents' ages, gender, or both; and (4) simulations indicated that the factor structure are the result of DIF. The removal of DIF vià`top-down puri®cation'' yielded two correlated clusters of items dubbed``New Age Philosophy'' and``Traditional Paranormal Beliefs''. Both clusters obey an Andrich rating-scale model with person reliabilities of 0.90 and 0.74, respectively. Principal component analysis con®rmed that these two clusters are unidimensional and without signi®cant age or gender DIF (p > 0.10). While the Traditional Paranormal Beliefs cluster continued to show a signi®cant main eect of age, neither cluster showed a signi®cant gender eect, thereby calling into question some traditional ®ndings regarding paranormal beliefs. We strongly suspect that the dearth of DIF studies indicates that age and gender biases due to DIF have largely gone unnoticed in the extant personality and assessment literature. 7
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