Design and Preliminary Validation of a Spirituality Questionnaire Based on the Concepts of the Holy Qur’an

The present study was conducted with the aim of designing and preliminarily validating the first version of the “Spirituality Questionnaire Based on the Concepts of the Holy Qur’an” for the measurement of spirituality. Considering the breadth and penetration of the concept of spirituality from various non-religious perspectives as well as from other religions within the field of psychology and counseling, it is necessary to extract the key concepts derived from the Holy Qur’an, regarded as the supreme and most authoritative sacred text revealed by Almighty God, so that an appropriate tool for measuring spirituality may also be designed. To this end, after examining all the verses of the Holy Qur’an, a goal–content table was developed. The method employed was content analysis, specifically conceptual analysis and interpretation. In this analysis, the semantic network was explored through an illuminative connection with a central concept of spirituality. Spirituality was conceptualized with the central theme of “devout and joyous devotion to proximity to God through orientation toward religious values at the levels of thought, inclination, decision, and behavior.” Based on the concepts extracted from the content analysis, an initial questionnaire was designed. For its validation, face validity and content validity methods were employed, and Cronbach’s alpha was used to examine the reliability of the questionnaire. The results of content analysis yielded 16 concepts: fear of God (khashyah), humility, charity (infaq), asceticism (zuhd), penitence and repentance (inabah and tawbah), honesty, sincerity (ikhlas), journeying through the earth and drawing lessons from the remnants of the past, reflection on the wonders of creation, death and reflection upon it, love of God, perceiving God as near, trust in God (tawakkul), belief in divine decree (qadar) and freedom from fear and sorrow, faith in the unseen, and belief in human dignity. On the basis of these concepts, a questionnaire containing 139 items was designed. The formulation of items and the content validity were examined by experts. In addition, for the assessment of face validity, approximately ten female high school students (second grade) reviewed the items of the questionnaire, and ambiguities in the phrasing of the items
were corrected. Subsequently, in order to examine consistency and internal coherence,
thirty female eleventh-grade students completed the final questionnaire, and using Cronbach’s alpha, 123 items were retained. The overall Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of the questionnaire was approximately 0.95. Therefore, the designed questionnaire possesses appropriate preliminary validity for measuring the concept of spirituality based on
the Qur’an, and with further complementary studies, a final version can be compiled. Moreover, the spirituality questionnaire can be expanded in terms of grounding in religious texts, such that authentic hadith sources may also undergo content analysis, thereby enabling the design of a spirituality questionnaire grounded in Islam.