Studying Dimensions of God Representation: Choosing Closed or Open-Ended Research Questions

God representation was studied by means of a questionnaire and by means of an open-ended question in a representative sample of students at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Data were analyzed for the two approaches by means of factor analysis and cluster analysis. Comparison of the two methods indicates that the answer structure of the two data sets is similar, but that the item list gave a somewhat better prediction of the answer to the open-ended question than vice versa.