Religiosity Interactional Program for University Students: Development and Validation

Abstract

So far a variety of programs have been executed on religious education but effectiveness of them is doubt. Therefore it is necessary to arrange some kind of religious education so that it could enable us to empirically examine its effectiveness. To address this necessity the aim of this study was development and validation the religiosity interactional program for University students. The research was an applied quasi-experimental study with pretest-posttest design and control group (multiple groups with one control group). The experimental group consisted of 117 students selected by convenience method which fell under ten experimental groups, each receiving training for one part of the educational package. The Religiosity Scale Short Form (Khodayari frd et al. 2009) was used for assessment of religiosity. Results showed religiosity interactional package had significant effect on religious beliefs and behaviors but no effect on the score of general religious practice and the religious emotions. The effectiveness of the educational package on the religious belief and behavior may be clarified by concepts such as the influence of appearance on inner world, brotherhood, social support, modeling for moral or religious life and the equivalence of spirituality and religiosity from Islamic point of view. This study also proved that there are serious restrictions in application of an empirical method to examine the effectiveness of the religious education program, which could influence the results of the study.

Keywords

• religion enhancement
• religion interaction program
• religion education
• students