Development and validation of Buddhist religiosity scale: An emic and etic approach

How they used Delve

A doctoral researcher at James Cook University uploaded all English-language transcripts — including those translated from Mandarin and Cantonese — into Delve to run Braun and Clarke's six-phase reflexive thematic analysis across interviews with 14 Buddhist monastic and lay scholars, building the qualitative foundation for a new Buddhist religiosity scale.

“All final English-language transcripts, including those originally conducted in Chinese, were uploaded into Delve (https://delvetool.com), an online qualitative data analysis platform, to facilitate systematic coding and theme development.”

Field

Psychology of religion / scale development for Buddhist religiosity

Data

Interviews with 14 monastic and lay Buddhist scholars across the Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions in several countries; interviews conducted in Mandarin or Cantonese were translated into English by the principal investigator before analysis

Approach

Braun and Clarke's six-phase reflexive thematic analysis (2006, 2022) forming the emic half of an emic/etic scale development study: repeated readings with reflective notes, initial codes capturing semantic and latent meanings, sorting into candidate themes, refinement for internal consistency and distinction, naming and defining, then weaving themes into a narrative. Coding was manual throughout. Theme development was discussed periodically with the supervisory panel, and a reflexive journal documented analytic decisions and the researcher's positionality; a later quantitative phase validated the scale with 516 participants

Data types

Interviews