Spiritual Bypass Scale-12, Spanish Version (SBS-12)

The original scale (Spiritual Bypass Scale-13, SBS-13; Fox et al., 2017) identifies the qualities of SB and assesses how these qualities may influence the process of psycho-spiritual health and well-being. This instrument was only available in English, so it was necessary to translate it into Spanish. A fluent bilingual person whose native language was English then translated the items back into the original language to verify that the instrument’s semantics were not lost. The translated instrument was tested in a pilot sample. An item (”When someone confronts me, I tend to overanalyze his or her spiritual motivations for confronting me”) caused comprehension problems in this sample, so it was eliminated from the final version adapted to Spanish (see Appendix). The questionnaire was composed of 12 items and grouped into two dimensions: the first, psychological avoidance, contains 9 items and refers to avoiding complicated emotions or experiences through the individual’s spiritual beliefs (e.g., “When I feel emotional pain, the first thing I want to do is pray or meditate about it”). The second dimension, spiritualization, addresses the tendency to value daily activities as sacred as identified through three items (e.g., “When someone I know is experiencing hardship, I believe it is due to spiritual attacks or oppression”). The items are written on a Likert-type scale with four response options (from 0 = totally disagree, to 3 = totally agree). In this study, the final total score was used, which resulted from the sum of both dimensions, with higher values indicating greater SB. In the original version, it demonstrated a reliability of α = 0.85 for the total test, α = 0.82 for the psychological avoidance subscale and α = 0.75 for the spiritualization subscale. In this study, we show reliability indicators for the current sample, along with validity indicators (see section “Results”).