Assessing the affective dimension of religion within Muslim societies: the Sahin–Francis Scale of Attitude toward Islam, short form

Abstract

This study developed and tested a Turkish translation of the 23-item Sahin–Francis Scale of Attitude toward Islam (containing six negatively-voiced items) on data provided by 493 participants (191 school students and 302 undergraduate students). Two research questions were tested on these data. First, exploratory factor analyses suggested that negatively-voiced items were not performing well and so confirmed the judgement against employing such items in Muslim societies. Second, reliability analyses identified the best performing items to propose a seven-item short form of the Sahin–Francis Scale of Attitude toward Islam. This measure displayed good properties of internal consistency reliability (α = .86) and of construct validity against a measure of prayer frequency.