Validating a Scripture-Based Religious Orientation Scale and Exploring Its Relationship with Life Satisfaction

The present study aimed at developing and validating a religious orientation scale based solely on the Quran called Quranic Orientation Scale (QOS). To this end, the microstructural approach of schema theory was employed and all the ayat of the Quran which addressed its believers directly were scrutinized in terms of their constituting words as well as their relevance to pre-university or grade four senior high school (G4SHS) students. It resulted in choosing 57 Quranic ayat upon which the 60-item QOS was developed. Along with Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), the QOS was administered to 1123 students in two cities of Khorasan-e-Razavi province in Iran. The subjection of the collected data to Principal Axis Factoring and rotating the extracted factors via Varimax with Kaiser Normalization showed that 37 items loaded acceptably on seven factors representing the genera of Believing in Holy Scriptures, Remembering Allah Frequently, Fulfilling Quranic Obligations, Trusting Allah Awfully, Following Quranic Instructions, Not Befriending Unbelievers and Informed Quranic Struggle. Correlational analysis of the data showed that not only the QOS but also its underlying factors correlate significantly with the SWLS, indicating that the domain and genera of religious orientation are central to Islam and relate significantly to G4SHS students’ satisfaction with life.

Keywords:

Religious orientation , schema theory , Islam , the Quran