Construction and Validation of Taqwa Scale in Urdu Language

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to construct and validate a culturally and linguistically relevant scale to measure the concept of taqwa in Urdu. The researchers used a deductive- item writing approach to generate a pool of 65 items. After qualitative analysis, some of the items were rephrased, other were discarded by experts of the field. The remaining 50 items were kept in the scale for further quantitative analysis. The experimental tryout sample comprised of 250 participants and their age ranged from 13 to 43 years (M=20.84, SD=6.01). Along with the current scale two standardized instruments namely Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS; Aslam, 2016) for discriminant validity and Muslim Spiritual Attachment Scale (MSAS;) for convergent validity were also used. Item-total correlation was computed, 28 items were retained while 22 items were discarded due to correlation below 0.30. After the confirmation through the KMO measure having a value of .86, Principal Component Analysis with Oblimin rotation was carried over. The following two factors were yielded upon Exploratory Factor Analysis. Factor 1 labeled as “Fear of Allah” comprises 18 items while factor 2 named as “Self accountability” comprises 10 items. The scale showed good reliability, with an alpha coefficient of .88. The convergent and discriminant validity of the scale was also proved with significant positive correlation between Taqwa and Muslim Spiritual Attachment to God scale and non-significant correlation with DASS.  Hence Taqwa scale is a reliable tool with established psychometric properties for assessing Taqwa in a native cultural framework.

Keywords: Taqwa (piety), quantitative analysis, exploratory factor analysis, convergent validity, discriminant validity