Appeal Index (Tawassul-Joei), a Supplement to the Religious Measurement Models in Iran: Experimental Research in Yazd City

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

1 Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, Yazd University

2 Associate Professor, National Population & Comprehensive Management Institute, Tehran, Iran

3 MA in Sociology, Yazd University

Abstract

Introduction: A review of all models and items designed to measure religiosity in Iran shows that none of these models regularly and methodically show the specific features of the Shiite religion. To address this shortcoming, in this article, relying on the views of Henry Corbin, we have highlighted one of the special aspects of Shiism, namely, "the continuity and continuity of man's relationship with God through the Imams and the saints and by extracting the concept of "Appeal (Tawassul-Joei)", it provides its operational definition in three dimensions: "belief", "ritual (practical)" and "experimental" for use in religious assessment surveys, and in the experimental part, this concept is measured in Yazd.
Method: This study is quantitative and survey. The statistical population of all men and women is 15 to 64 years old in Yazd city, which according to the 2016 census, includes 365298 people. Based on the Cochran's formula, 384 people were identified as the sample. Due to the number of variables in this study and the random sampling of multistage clusters and the need to access more samples, the sample size increased to 400 people and men and women to an equal number were selected. The data collection tool was a questionnaire and the research data were collected in a three-month period in the summer of 2016 by directing the researcher to the selected samples in Yazd city and conducting interviews and completing the questionnaires.
Finding: The results of the research show that the level of recourse in the study community is relatively high and the pattern of responses to recourse measures is very similar to the pattern of Iranians' responses to religiosity measures. Also, the type and intensity of the relationship between recourse to contextual variables is similar to the type and intensity of the relationship between religiosity and contextual variables. The field findings of the study show that the rate of recourse is higher among women than men and among married people more than single people. In this study, a significant and inverse relationship was observed between the social class and the rate of recourse, so that the recourse of the lower class was reported more than the upper class. The more selective the treatment of religion and the more privatized the religion among individuals, the lower the rate of recourse. The inverse and significant relationship between lifestyle and the rate of recourse means that the more religious people are, the more traditional and non-modern lifestyles become.
Results & Conclusion: Although the results of this study indicate a relatively similar resemblance of the response model to "recourse" measures with the response model to religiosity measures in other research in this field, it is still not possible to be innovative about these measures and their strength in measuring differences. The subtleties of Shiite religiosity were carefully judged. Certainly the metrics designed here, while being critiqued by other researchers, should be tested in multiple experimental studies, with different statistical communities, and the results of this research should be consistent with the results of other metrics. Religiosity should be compared, and then one can judge how well the proposed measures here have been able to shed new light on the research of religiosity in Iran.

Keywords


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