Öz
Religiosity has been one of the most debated issues in Turkey in recent years. There has been considerable confusion in understanding the concepts of religiosity. The aim of this study is to develop a measurement tool that makes it easier to determine the religious perception of individuals. It is known that religions guide their believers in matters such as organizing their social lives and dealing with life difficulties. People who believe in the same religion can have a variety of different perspectives about religion and religious concepts. In this case, to find the source of the differentiation, a measurement tool was needed. It was decided to develop a scale to meet this need. Researchers should be aware that the scale developed with this study was prepared to measure individuals' perception of religiousness, not religiousness.
The first part of this study covers scientific investigation about the classifications of religiosity. It includes classification and scale development studies of religiosity in the Western countries and classifications of Islamic Philosophers about belief. The second part of the study includes discussions on classifications in the psychology of religion and the sociology of religion in Turkey. The third part covers the research model, universe, sample, data collection, and research findings.
Avicenna (2017: 182), one of the people who developed a definition on this subject, made a triple classification according to how people practice their religion. In his classification, the person who turned away from the possessions of this world is named as "zahit", the person who is devoted to worship as "abid", and the person who turned to the transcendent realm as "arif". Also, the well-known Turkish philosopher Hilmi Ziya Ülken has determined three different types of faith of the believer. Those whose beliefs are based on common sense intuition and imitation are those who have the coalman's faith (Ülken, 1958: 230; Ülken, 1963: 54), those who derive their opinions from the teachings of faith are those who have the faith of the theologian, and those who can purge their beliefs from the inaccurate information by critical reasoning are those who have the faith of the philosopher. (Tan, 2018: 629).
William James's classification of individual and institutional religiosity, Allport's (1967) distinction between internal and external religiosity and Glock and Stark's (1966) dimensions of religious commitment have been used as references in academic studies in the field of sociology of religion and psychology of religion in Turkey. The studies on religiosity in Turkey in recent years are also based on these classifications. These studies were also taken into consideration when determining the scale dimensions.
When developing the scale, open-ended questions were prepared firstly, then participants (N=105) were asked what they understood from the concept of religious people. An item pool was created using the data. These items were presented to experts from the fields of psychology of religion, sociology of religion, Islamic philosophy, psychology, and statistics. Considering experts' opinions and the principle of usefulness, the number of items was reduced from 145 to 41 and the pilot study was applied. The pilot application was carried out with the participation of students from Kırıkkale University (N = 98). In the exploratory factor analysis, the KMO Bartlett coefficient was 0.959, the degree of freedom was 406, and the significance level was P <0.005. Varimax rotation was used during the exploratory factor analysis. As a result of the analysis, a four-dimensional scale with 35 items was obtained. After applying the scale (N = 426) an explanatory factor analysis was performed with the SPSS program, and a confirmatory factor analysis was performed with the LISREL program, and it was confirmed that it is a four-dimensional scale with 35 items. The factor load values of the items in each dimension of the scale vary between 0.48 and 0.85. It is seen that the total variance that four dimensions can explain is 57.03%.