Scale of Attitudes-Opinions towards Turkish Religious Music Lesson through distance education: a study of validity and reliability

Abstract

Distance education has taken its place among the alternative processes of formal education during possible crisis periods with the pandemic (Covid-19) process in Turkey and the world. This experience has led researchers to field studies to increase efficiency in applied education as in every field. In this study in the same direction, it was aimed to develop a scale whose validity and reliability were determined in order to determine the opinions and attitudes of students studying at the Faculties of Theology and Islamic Sciences towards Turkish religious music courses through distance education. 796 students from 14 different universities in 7 regions of Turkey participated in the study; this number was reduced to 664 in the data cleaning phase of the pre-control process. IBM Statistics 26.0 and Amos 22.0 programs were used for the analysis of the data obtained. In order to test the suitability of the processed data for factor analysis and sample size, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) sampling adequacy criterion and Bartlett (Bartlett's test) sphericity tests were performed. In this context, it was determined that KMO was at a “very good” value and Bartlett's test was at a statistically “significant” value. When the factor extraction process was started for the scale, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was applied and it was seen that the factors explained 60.739% of the total variance and it was determined that the scale formed a 4-factor structure. The resulting factor structure was verified by Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) in the context of different fit tests and it was seen that the findings obtained were within the “good, acceptable and significant” value ranges. Reliability calculation with Cronbach's Alpha was also performed for the validated scale and it was found that the overall scale had “good” reliability. As a result, the “Attitudes-Opinions Scale towards Turkish Religious Music Lessons with Distance Education” with 16 items and 4-factor structure, whose validity and reliability were revealed, was developed; the stages related to the development process of the scale were given under the subheading “development process of the data collection tool” and the results obtained were processed in the findings section. It is aimed that this study, which is brought to the literature as the first scale development in the field of Turkish religious music, will be an up-to-date and referable data collection tool for researchers.