Religious devotion scale: validity and reliability study

Abstract

Religious devotion is the religious person's shaping his/her life on the axis of religion, living for his/her religion, and risking all kinds of sacrifices and altruism on behalf of his/her religious belief. In this study, it was tried to determine what religious devotion is and what its dimensions are and in this direction, it was aimed to develop a measurement tool to measure religious devotion. In the scale development process, a question pool of 30 items was created and applied to a population of 30 people by taking expert opinion and the statements that were difficult to understand were edited. The scale was administered to people aged 40 years and above who characterized themselves as "religious" and "very religious" with reference to subjective perception of religiosity and minimum age of religious maturity. In order to determine the construct validity of the scale, exploratory factor analysis was conducted with 250 participants, and as a result of this analysis, a three-dimensional structure consisting of 17 items was obtained. The dimensions were named as "religious consciousness", "action-sacrifice" and "religious fanaticism" respectively. In order to confirm the structure formed as a result of the exploratory factor analysis, a different application was carried out with 350 participants. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis applied to the data obtained supported the three-factor structure of the scale. When the psychometric data produced about the scale were evaluated, it was concluded that this scale developed to measure "religious devotion" is a sufficiently valid and reliable measurement tool.