{"id":16,"date":"2022-07-14T17:42:49","date_gmt":"2022-07-14T17:42:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.keene.edu\/bigbeliefs\/?page_id=16"},"modified":"2024-11-18T10:00:44","modified_gmt":"2024-11-18T15:00:44","slug":"past-research","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.keene.edu\/bigbeliefs\/past-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Past Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adult Worldview Study (2020)<\/h2>\n

A worldview is a set of core beliefs about the nature of the universe and humanity, one\u2019s place in the universe and in their social context, and how one should live their life (Kearney, 1984; Nilsson, 2014). Very little is known about the development of worldviews and how worldview beliefs, values, and attitudes are organized into a single worldview. One challenge to conducting such research is the lack of an agreed-upon definition of worldviews and corresponding worldview questionnaire. So, this research sought to develop a comprehensive worldview questionnaire.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To create this new worldview questionnaire, we combined five existing worldview questionnaires (totaling 160 questions) and administered them to undergraduate students. Using factor analyses, we were able to identify the weakest questions and reduced the combined worldview questionnaire to 77 questions. We then administered the 77 questions to a new, larger group of 772 adult participants that we recruited online. This time, we used factor analyses to reduce the questions down to 41. These analyses also revealed that participants\u2019 worldviews consisted of five major components:<\/span><\/p>\n

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This new comprehensive worldview questionnaire, the Unified Worldview Measure (UWM) was then used as the basis for the first child-friendly worldview questionnaire, the Unified Worldview Measure \u2013 Child Form (UWM-CF). See below for a summary of that research.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Child Worldview Study (2020)<\/h2>\n

A person\u2019s worldview is related to their mental health, levels of prejudice, and many other important factors. However, we still don\u2019t know much about how we form our worldviews. In this research, we created the first child-friendly worldview questionnaire and gave it to 83 children ages 7-9 years old and 249 adults, including 44 parents of th<\/span>e participating children. Once the responses of the children and adults were collected and analyzed, we found that there are four main components of adults’ worldviews and three main components of children’s worldviews (<\/span>see the diagram below<\/span><\/i>).<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Here are some of the results from the study:<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n