A Study Of Superstition Belief In Chinese Middle School Students

Superstition belief refers to the false belief which is derived from individual’s malign attribution or observational learning. Superstition belief is often reinforced by unrelated-stimulation. It will lead to prefer or hate certain things, do or avoid certain behavior pattern.There is a striking difference between Chinese and Hesperian by the reason of the different culture. The belief of superstition is no exception. Most Chinese don’t believe in the Trinity, by contrast, they worship god, ghost, ancestor and nature. So the localization is an important principle when we study of superstition belief in the context of Chinese culture.In the past few years, many psychologists conducted some preliminary studies of superstition belief. Skinner, one of the most famous behaviorists, trained six superstitious pigeons, and he explained the conclusion by the theory of the operant conditioning. Festinger, another famous psychologist, found that man was inclined to believe the prophecy if he peddled it. Some other psychologists, such as Tobacyk and Zimbardo, developed some questionnaire which had good reliability and validity to measure the individual’s superstition belief in certain degree.The researcher of this study modified the paranormal believes scale and investigated the paranormal believes in junior middle school student in Sichuan province. The conclusions suggest that the foreign instrument is not suitable for Chinese subjects.To sum up, the study of superstition belief in Chinese middle school must weigh and consider the cultural factors and the time factors and develop an optimum instrument.There were3064subjects participated in this study for six times in Chongqing city and Sichuan province. Base on the literature review and the conclusions of the open-ended questionnaire and the previous research, a50-items questionnaire was made. Through the popular test and three times of the exploratory factor analysis, the formal scale with the24items is made. Succeeding, the research investigated275students for confirmatory factor analysis and the common method variance test,67students for the four weeks’ test-retest reliability test,289students and236students for the convergent and discriminant validity respectively. Totally572students completed the formal scale, self-confident questionnaire of adolescence, self-liking/self-competence scale and self-supporting personality scale for adolescent students to test the criterion validity and for the latent profile analysis.The formal superstition belief in Chinese middle school students consisted of six4-items subscale, the confirmatory factor analysis supported the six factor model, the fit index excluded the common method variance shows the model is rational: χ2/df=2.187, CFI=0.907, TLI=0.883, SRMR=0.050, RMSEA=0.066. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of the superstition scale and each subscale were from0.66to0.92; the test-retest reliability (4weeks interval) were0.8-0.9(ICC).By the measurement invariance test, it is proved that the items of the formal scale have the same meaning and function across the gender. By gender, there are gender differences whether in total or in all dimensions except in Psi. By grade, there are significant difference whether in total or in all dimensions. The trend of the superstition belief in Chinese middle school students decreases with the increasing of the grade.There were five types of superstition belief in Chinese middle school students which were distinguished by the latent profile analysis. F test showed the significant difference between the difference type of superstition belief in self-confidence, self-esteem and self-supporting personality.The main results of this study are as follow:(1) The superstition belief in Chinese middle school students is multi-dimensional model. The psychological structure of superstition belief in Chinese middle school students includes six factors.(2) The scale of superstition belief in Chinese middle school students has been proved to be good reliability and validity and be used as an effective tool to measure the superstition belief in Chinese middle school students.