Construction and validation of a measure of beliefs relative to "laicite"

Recently, social psychology has taken an interest in attitudes and beliefs about lakite and their relations to other variables, such as expressions of prejudice. Laicite can be defined as the separation of churches and State, the role of the State being to assure an equality and a freedom of religion. The aim of this study was to construct a measure of beliefs of laicite, and then to compensate for the lack of reliable measures about the possible interpretations of laicite. The exploratory (study 1) and confirmatory factor analyses (study 2) led to sixteen items being included in the scale and representing four laicite dimensions: public expression of religious beliefs, religious neutrality of the State and its institutions, equality of different religious beliefs, and protection of religious groups. Correlations across different dimensions showed that the public expression of religious beliefs was positively correlated with equality of different religious beliefs and negatively to neutrality of the State and its institutions. Moreover, convergent and discriminant validity (studies 2 and 3) showed that dimensions of laicite are differently correlated with prejudice, SDO, religiosity, or with the republican model's adhesion. t-tests showed that compared to Catholics, agnostics and atheistics want a stronger religious neutrality of the State, are more in favor of an equalitarian treatment of different religious beliefs, but are less in favor of a protection of religion by State. Concerning the attachment to laicite, this variable is only very weakly correlated with the four dimensions. Statistical analysis conducted on attachment to lakite and other psychosocial variables such as prejudice, social dominance orientation (SDO), religiosity, religious beliefs (atheistics and agnostics vs. catholics) and political orientation showed that only SDO is (negatively) related to attachment to lakite. These results suggest different conceptions of lakite depending on psychosocial variable such as religion, prejudice or SDO. Finally, a test-retest has been effected on the scale (study 4). The results shown that the adhesion to the laicite's dimensions is stable in the time. (C) 2017 Societe Francaise de Psychologie. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.