Empirical Fitness of Conceptual-Structural Models for Measurement of Religiosity

Faculty member, Department of Sociology of Revolution, Imam Khomeini and Islamic Revolution Research Institute Religiosity is an abstract, multifaceted and multi-dimensional concept that should be referred to observable indicators for its scientific study and empirical research. A review of empirical studies in the field of religion and religiosity shows that overall there are two strategies for empirical measurement of religiosity. First, the prevailing and conventional method in operationalization of concepts, that is, identification and determination of the main dimensions and then determination of sub-dimensions or components and finally, introduction of observable indicators for empirical measurement. The second strategy is related to the understanding of the structure of religiosity, that is, going beyond simple description of dimensions of religiosity and offering an explanatory plan which defines the causal relations between different dimensions of religion. A few researchers of religion, without determining the central dimensions of religion and religiosity, have studied the nature of relationship between these dimensions through a conceptual-structural model of religion and religiosity. The present paper is an attempt to explain four models of conceptual-structural models of religiosity and also to compare them with the data garnered from National Survey of Islamic Religiosity of Iranians through structural covariance analysis to assess the empirical fitness of each of them in order to find out which conceptual-structural model of religiosity is empirically a more preferred one.