Abstract
The main purpose of the psychology of religion course is “to understand and try to explain the religious life of the individual in all its breadth and depth.” Achieving this goal for the psychology of religion course is related to the attitudes of the students in theology faculties towards this course. Since it is known that there is a relationship between the attitudes of students towards courses and their academic achievements, students with positive attitudes towards the course are more easily motivated to learn, and those with negative attitudes are less interested in the course. In this context, it is important to investigate the attitudes of theology faculty students towards the psychology of religion course.
One of the main reasons for studying attitudes is that it allows behavior to be predicted. The intensity of people’s attitudes is attempted to be understood by determining the degree of interest or indifference towards certain things. For this purpose, it is aimed to conduct a scale development study that can be used to determine the attitudes of the theology faculty students towards the psychology of religion course. It is assumed that knowing the attitudes of the theology faculty students towards the psychology of religion course, revealing their negative attitudes, if any, and their reasons will guide the future decisions to make the course more qualified.
This study uses the survey method. The study group consists of junior and senior year university students of theology faculties located in different provinces of Turkey. The study group consists of 481 students, of which 354 (73.6%) are female and 127 (26.4%) are male. Following the literature review, a pool of 42 items was created and the number of items was reduced to 39 after receiving an expert opinion. The data collected through the pre-test were loaded into the SPSS 16.0 and made ready for analysis. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) technique was used for the factor analysis of the scale and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was used to test the accuracy of the factor structure.
After the statistical work performed on the validity of the scale, its KMO value was found to be 0.965. A KMO value above 0.90 is considered “excellent” for the sample size. Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was significant (X2= 11144.785; p<.05), which indicated that the data set had a multivariate normal distribution. When the slope graph was examined, it was observed that three factors with eigenvalues greater than one emerged. Since it was seen that the scale had more than one dimension, it was decided to perform the rotation process. For this, the vertical rotation (varimax rotation) technique was used. Following the repeated rotations, 25 items were found to be gathering under three factors greater than 1.
Following the inspection of eigenvalues and variance explanation ratios through factor analysis, it was observed that the scale items were grouped under three factors. The variance percentages of these factors are 34.078, 19.428, and 16.717 respectively. All factors account for 70,223% of the total variance. Factor loading values of the items were between 0.627 and 0.792. Considering the items with the highest loading values under the emerging factors, the factors were named as “Attaching importance/value“, “Showing interest/fondness”, and “Disapproval/Avoidance”.
The Cronbach Alpha internal consistency coefficient of the scale was found as α=0.97. To determine whether the scale distinguishes between the participants who demonstrated the measured behavior and who did not, the averages of lower 27% and upper 27% group scores were analyzed with independent samples t-test. After the statistical operations, the independent samples t-test results between the average item scores of the groups were observed to be varying between 18.291 and 43.252 and were statistically significant (p<.01) for all items. Analyses were performed on the correlations among the sub-factors of the scale and significant positive correlations were found between dimensions including Attaching importance/value and Showing interest/fondness (r=0.76;p<0.000), Attaching importance/value and Disapproval/Avoidance (r=0.58; p<0.000), and “Showing interest/fondness” and Disapproval/Avoidance (r=0.64; p<.000).
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed to confirm the emerging structure of the scale. According to the analyzes, the fit indices of the scale were χ2 /df= 2.7; NFI= .98; NNFI= .98; IFI= .98; RFI= .98; CFI= .98; RMR= .04 values indicate “perfect fit”, while GFI= .85 and RMSEA= .07 values indicate “acceptable fit”. When the results of the EFA and CFA were evaluated as a whole, it was concluded that the "Attitude Scale towards the Psychology of Religion Course" (ASTPRC) is a valid and reliable scale that can be used to measure attitudes towards the psychology of religion course.