The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE): Evidence of validity in the United States and India
- PMID: 37494339
- PMCID: PMC10370766
- DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287780
The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE): Evidence of validity in the United States and India
Abstract
Researchers increasingly recognize that the mind and culture interact at many levels to constitute our lived experience, yet we know relatively little about the extent to which culture shapes the way people appraise their experiences and the likelihood that a given experience will be reported. Experiences that involve claims regarding deities, extraordinary abilities, and/or psychopathology offer an important site for investigating the interplay of mind and culture at the population level. However, the difficulties inherent in comparing culture-laden experiences, exacerbated by the siloing of research on experiences based on discipline-specific theoretical constructs, have limited our ability to do so. We introduce the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE), which allows researchers to compare experiences by separating the phenomenological features from how they are appraised and asking about both. It thereby offers a new means of investigating the potentially universal (etic) and culture-specific (emic) aspects of lived experiences. To ensure that the INOE survey items are understood as intended by English speakers in the US and Hindi speakers in India, and thus can serve as a basis for cross-cultural comparison, we used the Response Process Evaluation (RPE) method to collect evidence of item-level validity. Our inability to validate some items drawn from other surveys suggests that they are capturing a wider range of experiences than researchers intend. Wider use of the RPE method would increase the likelihood that survey results are due to the differences that researchers intend to measure.
Copyright: © 2023 Taves et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Conflict of interest statement
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Similar articles
-
A feature-based approach to the comparative study of "nonordinary" experiences.Am Psychol. 2023 Jan;78(1):50-61. doi: 10.1037/amp0000990. Epub 2022 Feb 24. Am Psychol. 2023. PMID: 35201784 Review.
-
Clarifying Self-Report Measures of Social Anxiety and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder to Improve Reporting for Autistic Adults.Autism Adulthood. 2021 Jun 1;3(2):129-146. doi: 10.1089/aut.2019.0064. Epub 2021 Jun 7. Autism Adulthood. 2021. PMID: 36601465 Free PMC article.
-
Cultural directions and origins of everyday decisions.Integr Psychol Behav Sci. 2012 Jun;46(2):235-42. doi: 10.1007/s12124-012-9196-9. Integr Psychol Behav Sci. 2012. PMID: 22403021
-
Depressing time: Waiting, melancholia, and the psychoanalytic practice of care.In: Kirtsoglou E, Simpson B, editors. The Time of Anthropology: Studies of Contemporary Chronopolitics. Abingdon: Routledge; 2020. Chapter 5. In: Kirtsoglou E, Simpson B, editors. The Time of Anthropology: Studies of Contemporary Chronopolitics. Abingdon: Routledge; 2020. Chapter 5. PMID: 36137063 Free Books & Documents. Review.
-
Mystical and Other Alterations in Sense of Self: An Expanded Framework for Studying Nonordinary Experiences.Perspect Psychol Sci. 2020 May;15(3):669-690. doi: 10.1177/1745691619895047. Epub 2020 Feb 13. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2020. PMID: 32053465
References
-
- Kirmayer LJ, Worthman CM, Kitayama S, Lemelson R, Cummings CA, editors. Culture, mind, and brain: Emerging concepts, models, and applications. Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press; 2020. 534 p. (Current perspectives in social and behavioral sciences).
-
- Facco E. Consciousness and the mind-brain-body-world relationship: Towards a transdisciplinary and transcultural approach. Adv Soc Sci Res J [Internet]. 2023. Jan 31 [cited 2023 May 31];10(1). Available from: https://journals.scholarpublishing.org/index.php/ASSRJ/article/view/13896
-
- Bader C, Froese P, Johnson B, Mencken F, Stark R. Baylor Religion Survey, Wave II (2007) [Internet]. The ARDA. Open Science Framework; 2019. [cited 2022 Sep 2]. Available from: https://www.thearda.com/MAWizard/Concepts/MW_17_cc.asp?SAM=-1&GEO=-1&MO=...
Publication types
MeSH terms
Grants and funding
LinkOut - more resources
Full Text Sources