Designing a Model of Religious Education Strategies for Preschool Children in the Family (Mixed Research)

The purpose of this study was to design and fit a model of children’s religious education strategies in families.The research method is mixed (compound) with qualitative- quantitative design. The research population consisted of all parents of preschool students in Urmia city, 14 of whom were selected purposefully and through theoretical data saturation rule. Data collection tool in the qualitative section was semi- structured interviews and in the quantitative part was a questionnaire. After parental consent, the interviews were anonymously recorded and transcribed. In the second part, 222 parents were selected by simple random sampling and answered the questionnaires. To analyze the data in the qualitative analysis, the four- step method by Powell and Renner (2003) and in the quantitative part the structural equation model were used. The software used in the qualitative section was MAXQDA10 and in the quantitative analysis, SPSS16 and AMOS21 software were used. According to the results of the qualitative research, parents use four major strategies of «modeling”, «Islamic lifestyle”, «educational media» and «religious environments and occasions» to teach their children religion. The findings of the structural equation model showed that the four strategies of the conceptual model of research fitted and influenced the variations of parents’ methods for teaching religion to their children; besides, the ‘modeling’ and ‘lifestyle’ parameters were in the most influencial ones. Considering the findings of this sytudy, it is suggested that parents use the religious education strategies presented in this study to preschool children.