Author(s): Aziza ERGESHKYZY, Mualla YILDIZ
dead. Although most of the Kyrgyz people are Muslims, they have not yet abandoned their religious beliefs based on tradition. It is accepted that the traditional religious structure that has persevered among the Kyrgyz people for a long time is based on the culture of Tengrism, sun, moon, earth, water, ancestors and fire. While assigning sanctity to the forces of nature has existed in the traditional religious culture of the Kyrgyz people since the ancient times, the effects and conditions that have caused this belief and when it started are not completely understood yet. Effect of Traditional Kyrgyz Religion on today’s Kyrgyz society can be understood from information recounted by historians from ancient sources and from observation-based studies by sociologists. With this work, the objective was to develop a scale to determine how much of this effect can be determined. Scale items were written by scanning information in the literature, and after receiving expert opinion and finalizing items, the scale was applied on 600 people from seven distinct areas in Kyrgyzstan. Items subjected to exploratory factor analysis were divided into three factors including cult of ancestors, cult of the dead and cult of nature. Total variance value that the scale can explain is 51.93%. In the analysis applied for revealing reliability, Cronbach’s Alpha value for a total of seven items in belief in supernatural dimension was calculated as 0.790, it was calculated as 0.74 for five items in cult of ancestors, the second dimension, and it was calculated as 0.71 for three items in cult of the dead dimension in the study. Validity of factors were tested with confirmatory factor analysis. In the confirmatory factor analysis applied for calculating validity, it was determined that χ^2/sd value was 3.71 and CFI value was 0.97; GFI value was 0.93, and NFI value was 0.95. Since these values were over 0.90, the model was determined to show good fit. Therefore, the scale was found reliable and valid.
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