روان شناسی و دين

This study tries to develop a scale to measure the religious feeling of young children based on a survey method project and within the framework of conventional patterns of psychometrics, in the community of 4-6 year old children in Iran and on two sample groups of normal school students (445 students from Tehran, Kerman, Tabriz, Mashhad and Bandar Abbas) and religious school students (145 students from Qom) using a "descriptive" method. In this seven-item scale, a child is placed in a situation, as the hero of the story, with specific religious practices and ceremonies, and the examinee's feeling towards that situation is measured as happy, neutral or sad. Analyzing the data, it became clear that the degree of difficulty and ability to recognize the questions, as well as the frequency distribution of the answers, are appropriate and have an internal and external fit. The results of analyzing confirmatory factor and analyzing the main components of standardized remaining values confirms construct validity and the difference between two groups of children from normal and religious centers, the discriminant validity of the scale and the internal consistency coefficient higher than 0.7, and the indicators of personal separation and question validity based on the Rasch scale model. The average religious feeling of children was obtained higher than the difficulty of the questions. The degree of desirability of the items pilgrimage, going to Ashura ceremonies and rowza (mourning of Moharram), and helping the poor is lower than the level of children with the least positive feelings; while the degree of desirability of the items "going to the mosque" and "watching the mother praying" is the highest and "praying and learning the Quran" in kindergarten is higher than the average religious feeling among children. This scale is a valid and reliable tool for evaluating parents' performance in strengthening or weakening children's positive feelings towards religious behaviors and ceremonies, and also for evaluating the effectiveness of religious education programs in educational centers.