An Unknowable God: Ineffable and Authoritarian God Representations Show Comparable Associations With Depressive Symptoms

Description

The dataset comprises responses from 558 Hungarian adults who identified as religious or spiritually oriented and completed an online survey administered through Qualtrics. The sample includes demographic information (e.g., age, sex, education, religious affiliation, and belief in a personal God), together with measures of God representations, psychological distress, well-being, and spirituality-related variables. God representations were assessed with the Hungarian adaptation of the five-factor LAMBI measure, yielding scores for Limitless, Authoritarian, Mystical, Benevolent, and Ineffable representations, as well as an Unbelief control scale. Psychological functioning was measured with the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21, and the survey additionally included indicators of positive and negative affect, life satisfaction, and experienced relationship with God. The final analytic dataset contains complete data on all variables used in the study and was derived through listwise deletion without imputation of missing values

Steps to reproduce

The study can be reproduced by collecting data from religiously or spiritually oriented adults using the Hungarian LAMBI measure of God representations, the DASS-21, the SHALOM Transcendental subscale, and basic demographic and religiosity variables. The resulting scale scores are standardized and entered into a hierarchical regression model predicting depressive symptoms while controlling for demographic and religious covariates. The unique contribution of the Ineffable dimension is then evaluated by comparing it with the Authoritarian dimension, reversing predictor-entry order, examining anxiety and stress outcomes, and applying false-discovery-rate correction. Robustness is assessed by adding disbelief in God's existence and experienced relationship with God as additional controls and by re-estimating the models using alternative statistical approaches. Finally, the findings are replicated in a latent-variable structural equation model based on the individual LAMBI and DASS-21 items, and the manuscript figures are generated from these analyses.

Institutions

• University of Pecs

  Baranya, Pécs

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