Introducing the shortened Post-Critical Belief Scale

Recently, Fontaine et al. (2003) have shown that the Post-Critical Belief Scale (PCBS) captures the two orthogonal dimensions of the religiosity domain, namely Exclusion vs. Inclusion of Transcendence and Literal vs. Symbolic. The major drawback of the PCBS, however, is that it is a fairly lengthy questionnaire (33 items) with some rather lengthy and complex questions. In this article, a shortened version with 18 short items is presented. In three different samples (adolescents, students and adults) (Total N = 1003), the dimensions that can be distilled from this version are shown to be equivalent to the dimensions that can be distilled from the original version (r's > .90). In addition, it is shown that the components of the shortened and the original PCBS yield highly similar relations with external variables. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.