Designing and examining psychometric features of Spiritual Tendencies Questionnaire among Isfahan University students

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Abstract

Introduction and objective: because of importance of spirituality and human's spiritual development, and also considering spirituality as fourth aspect from World Health Organization perspective, design of a tool evaluating individuals' spirituality tendencies – regardless of their religion – has been taken into consideration. Hence, designing and examining Spiritual Tendencies Questionnaire among IsfahanUniversity students is the main aim of this research.
Method: to do the study, 307 subjects (151 male and 156 female) of graduate and postgraduate students of IsfahanUniversity – in years 1386-1387 – were selected using simple random sampling. Afterwards, they were evaluated based on Spiritual Tendencies Questionnaire.
Results: according to Chi-square test, it was realized that the questionnaire has four fundamental factors – spiritual believes, spiritual experience in life, spiritual self-actualization, and socio-religious activities – based on total variance 57.14%. Reexamining validity of the questionnaire demonstrated that the mentioned fundamental factors have high as well as significant correlation coefficients with each other and also with the total number of the questionnaire (P<0/001). Moreover, using Cronbach's alpha, reliability of the questionnaire was confirmed. Accordingly, measures of "spiritual believes", "spiritual experience in life", "spiritual self-actualization", and "socio-religious activities" had alpha coefficients 0.89, 0.63, 0.83 and 0.88, respectively. Notably, total alpha coefficient of the questionnaire was equal to 0.93.Discussion: evaluation of Spiritual Tendencies Questionnaire indicated that it has acceptable reliability coefficient to be applied for future research in related areas. 

Keywords