Running head: ARTICLE CRITIQUE

Article Critique
Bianca R. Williams
University of North Texas

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Article Critique

In other studies, researchers have found that the religious culture and its believers have a
higher social self-esteem in comparison to non-believers. This is the hypothesis that researchers
wanted to test in this article in an effort of replication. Researchers gathered their data across 11
different countries of about equally male and female samples. In order to attain the samples
personal religiosity; researchers asked them to rate how important their personal religious beliefs
were to them on a scale of 1 to 7. In order to attain the samples psychological adjustment,
researchers asked the sampled people how each one of the words that they listed described them
on a scale of 1 to 7. This list of words consisted of words like: adaptable, calm, cheerful, content,
energetic, healthy, etc. The researchers then asked the sampled people two questions indicating
how they reacted in social situations. After gathering all of the data the researchers scored each
country based on the results of the questions that were asked. The researchers averaged the
results of each country based on the question: how important is religion to you? On the second
part of scoring, each country the researchers accounted for the number of people that said: no,
religion is not important in their life. After taking everything into consideration each country was
given an index number. After reviewing all of the results of all of the countries, the overall
results indicated a moderately positive correlation between social self-esteem and psychological
adjustment. The researchers found that the higher index number that was assigned to them
previously, the higher correlation the country had to the variables they were testing. Therefore,
the original hypothesis was supported, but they also advised for the experiment to be replicated.
The article has many cons when looking at it from a readers perspective. To start
off with, article did not include an abstract. This is an important aspect because it summarizes the
article and gives the reader a preview of what is to come. Whenever the researchers chose their

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sample, they only included people on the eDarling-dating site. Online dating sites could only
attract certain type of people and this is not representing the whole of every country; the sample
is only representing this small pool of people. The average age that the sample tested was 37.49
years old. This age is unrepresentative of the younger generation (18 years and below) as well as
the older generation (60+ years). The sample should have included married couples without
online dating profiles as well as children and the older generation. The researcher based a
persons personal religiosity based purely off of one question. Why were there not more
questions that were asked? Also, whenever the researchers were evaluating a persons
psychological adjustment they again only based their results off of one question that included
answering a question over whether 10 words described you or not. There clearly should have
been other questions besides the ones that revolved around how well a word describes you.
On the contrary, there were also many pros when reading this article. The article started
off with other researchers findings over the topic, and then the article clearly stated their
hypothesis. Something that was very acceptable was the proportion of men to women within the
sample. This shows that the data is not sided towards one specific gender. The sample size was
magnificent because it was 187,957 people across the world. The experiment was constructed
across 11 European countries; which provides good general results. Whenever the researchers
were evaluating social self-esteem they asked the sampled people to answer multiple questions
and based their results on those answers rather than just one single question. The researchers
went a step further and made individual results for each country and assigned each country an
index number in accordance to the results. Due to this classification, it made it easier to see the
correlation of the religious culture and the social self-esteem because each country had variations
of religious views. In the ending portion of the article the researcher suggested that their

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experiment be replicated to improve reliability. This is something that every experiment should
advise in order to prove their theory is correct.

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References

Gebauer, J.E., Neberich, W., Sedikides, C. (2011). Religiosity, Social Self-Esteem, and
Psychological Adjustment: On the Cross-Cultural Specifically of the Psychological
Benefits of Religiosity. Psychological Science, 1-3.