The Construction and Validation of an Assessment Scale for the Students' Spiritual Needs

The purpose of this study was to construct and validate an assessment scale for spiritual needs. The first version of the scale, which included 164 items, was formulated with the help of the Shojaei's (2007) article. The population was the students of Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman. This descriptive-analytical study was done by the survey method. Then, the scale was reduced to 74 items according to the experts' ideas. By the simple random sampling, 740 students were selected as the sample and answered the questionnaire. For analyzing the data, the confirmatory factor analysis of main components by covariance or correlation matrix was used with the help of SPSS software. The calculation of Cronbach's alpha showed that the internal reliability coefficient for the whole questionnaire was 0.98. The factor loading of all components ranging from 0.82 to 0.92 and all questions ranging from 0.58 to 0.86 was significant. Therefore, this scale can assess the spiritual needs with the research and diagnostic objectives.