Development and validation of an Islamic religious orientation scale with pilgrims of Imam Reza Shrine

Abstract

The present study aimed at exploring the factorial validity of an enlarged Religious Orientation Scale (ROS) within an Islamic context. To this end, several national and international pilgrims visiting the Imam Reza Shrine in Mashhad, Iran, were interviewed and eleven items were added to the thirty-three-item ROS developed and validated by Khodadady and Bagheri (2012). The forty-four-item Islamic ROS (IROS) was then administered to seven hundred forty nine pilgrims as they entered it through its sixteen gates to pray. The application of the Principal Axis Factoring to the data and rotating the extracted factors via Varimax with Kaiser Normalization showed that ten latent variables having the initial eigen values of one and higher underlie the scale, i.e., Inspirational, Intrinsic, Congregational, Social, Ceremonial, Sacrificial, Theo-Pacific, Humanitarian, Concessional and Observant. Internal consistency reliability estimates indicated that the IROS and its latent variables provide reliable measures of religious orientations. The scale and its underlying factors are discussed by employing schema theory and suggestions are made for future research