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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Quantitative Psychology and Measurement
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1408734

The Illusory Health Beliefs Scale: Preliminary validation using exploratory factor and Rasch analysis

Provisionally accepted
Andrew Denovan Andrew Denovan 1*Neil Dagnall Neil Dagnall 2Kenneth G. Drinkwater Kenneth G. Drinkwater 2Álex Escolà-Gascón Álex Escolà-Gascón 3
  • 1 People and Performance, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, United Kingdom
  • 2 Psychology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, North West England, United Kingdom
  • 3 Quantitative Methods and Statistics, Comillas Pontifical University, Madrid, Madrid, Spain

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Illusory health beliefs are ill-founded, erroneous notions about well-being. They are important as they can influence allied attitudes, actions, and behaviours to the detriment of personal and societal welfare. Noting this, and the prevalence of paranormal beliefs in contemporary Western society, researchers developed the Paranormal Health Beliefs Scale (PHBS).Modification of the PHBS for use with a United Kingdom-based sample resulted in the instrument broadening to incorporate illusory rather than merely paranormal health beliefs. The present study psychometrically assessed the emergent Illusory Health Beliefs Scale (IHBS).The principal objective was to validate the IHBS using a large, representative sample. Eight hundred and fifty participants (360 males, 482 females, eight non-binary) completed the IHBS alongside instruments assessing theoretically associated constructs (i.e., magical thinking, faith in scientifically unsubstantiated notions, and forms of self-referential, intuitive causation).Exploratory factor analysis revealed the existence of six meaningful IHBS dimensions:Religious/Spiritual, Superstition, Precognitive, Health Myths, Scepticism, and Health Pseudoscience. The IHBS demonstrated satisfactory reliability and convergent validity with theoretically aligned constructs. Rasch analysis at the subscale level revealed good item/person fit and item/person reliability, unidimensionality, and equivalency of items across subgroups (gender and religious affiliation). Analysis confirmed the IHBS was an effective measure of illusory health beliefs. However, researchers should undertake further work to refine the scale and evaluate its performance across different samples and time points.

    Keywords: convergent validity, illusory health beliefs, Illusory Health Beliefs Scale, questionnaire scrutiny, Rasch analysis

    Received: 28 Mar 2024; Accepted: 04 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Denovan, Dagnall, Drinkwater and Escolà-Gascón. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Andrew Denovan, People and Performance, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, United Kingdom

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