Empirical Comparison of Religiosity Measure Based on MRPI Model with Two Other Prevalent Measures

One of the criticisms is usually leveled against measures of religiosity in our society is that most of these measures are not based on Islamic worldview. Since religiosity has different meanings on the basis of the contents of each religion, for a precise coining of a concept it is necessary to design indigenous models for every religion, including Islam. Among the models designed by Muslims to measure religiosity, one may mention MRPI, designed in Malaysia in 2007. Attempts have been made in the present study to normalize MRPI among Iranian youth and also to empirically compare it with the measures offered by Dr. Shojaizand and the measure borrowed from Glock and Stark models in a single population. The survey was conducted among the students of the University of Tehran. The sample constituted of 391 students. The findings of the research indicate that first of all the MRPI measure enjoys the scientific criteria of a scale; secondly, with regard to the degree of religiosity and relations between religiosity and background variables, the garnered data are almost equal for three measures. The Spearman correlation coefficients between the scores of measures confirm the high validity of the measures, to the extent that the MRPI’s correlation with Glock measure is 0.756 which is highly significant (s=0.000).