ACU Worldview Assessment

Reliability

How Do We Know the Arizona Christian University Worldview Assessment Accurately and Consistently Measures Your Worldview?

As you might expect, the version of the Arizona Christian University Worldview Assessment that is currently in use is not the “first draft” of the slate of questions used. Based on extensive testing, the current version of the Assessment is the result of more than two years of design, testing, and refinement.

Researchers have two ways of evaluating the veracity of a survey instrument or research process: reliability and validity. Perhaps the more common method of determining the trustworthiness of a research instrument is reliability testing. That process seeks to ascertain whether a questionnaire or research approach produces the same result when the application is repeated among the same sample of individuals after an elapsed interval of time. There are several types of reliability testing. For the Arizona Christian University Worldview Assessment, we used what is known as the test-retest method.

In this approach you utilize the same techniques and tools with the same population over a period of time. In our case, we invited a sample of worldview experts – mostly professors who teach worldview and pastors who have studied, written, and preached about worldview – to evaluate the Assessment. Because these are individuals whose knowledge of worldview would not be expected to change over time, we hypothesized that any changes in outcomes after administering the same measurements across two points in time would represent a flaw in the measurement instrument, necessitating alternations in the tool. Our application of this method produced a stability coefficient that indicates we may have a very high level of confidence that the questionnaire produces reliable worldview results.

In addition, we engaged in validity testing to determine if the indicators we are using examine what we intend them to measure. In this process we study whether differences in answers given by respondents are attributable to real differences in their reactions to stable stimuli, rather than due to constant or random errors in design. Our testing of the Arizona Christian University Worldview Assessment utilized two distinct approaches to validity testing: convergent and discriminant. In both cases, the outcomes enabled us to refine this tool along the way to the point where we are now satisfied with the ability of the instrument to measure what we intend to measure.

Based upon achieving strong reliability and validity scores, we are confident that the Arizona Christian University Worldview Assessment can be relied upon to provide accurate and actionable results.

Groups

When all participants have completed the assessment, a designated point person receives a detailed analysis of the congregation’s or group’s worldview. This includes scores in a series of modules that identify the aggregated responses of the group. The modules include the five key categories that are used to determine worldview. These results are compared to national norms, based on national survey results of persons who identify themselves as Christian.

Individual participants in the group assessment remain anonymous and receive a customized personal worldview report within a few minutes of completing the assessment. The confidential individual report summary identifies the individual’s dominant worldview and provides a definition of that worldview.

The assessment measures beliefs and behaviors in five key worldview categories:

• Bible, Truth, Morals
• Faith Practices
• God, Creation, History
• Lifestyle, Behavior, Relationships
• Sin, Salvation, God Relationship