The Impact of Religious Officials on Social Life: A Research on Scale Development, Validity and Reliability

Tradition and religion are two important sources that affect the construction and continuity of social relations throughout history. Before the modern period, when the secular social structure was widely accepted, these two sources served as the primary determinant resource of social ties, sometimes alone and frequently together. This study aims to develop a scale to determine the effect of the level of clerics (imams and muezzins) working under the Presidency of Religious Affairs, the institution authorized to serve religious services in Turkey, on social life. In this context, a survey was conducted with 1208 people in 12 provinces and 42 districts, based on a face-to-face interview method. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were used to test the reliability and validity of the scale made for this study, in which the universe is taken as a whole. The scale, whose reliability and validity were tested, can be used to assess the impact of religious officials on family, kinship, neighborliness, and work life as well as the impact of religion on state-society relationships.