Validity and Reliability of the Instrument in Measuring the Identity of Hindu Saivites through Beliefs and Religious Practices

Malaysia is a unique country that consists of various races with different religious and cultural backgrounds. In maintaining national harmony, knowing and understanding the cultures and religions of other races is important. As is well known, Hinduism is one of the minority religions practiced by Malaysians, particularly the Indian community. However, few people are aware that in Hinduism there are also several sects. This study is conducted to understand the identity of the Hindu religious sect that is practiced by the majority of the Malaysian Hindu community, namely Saivism, through beliefs and religious practices. Thus, an instrument for measuring the identity of Hindu Saivites through beliefs and religious practices has been developed. A pilot study was conducted involving 50 respondents consisting of Hindu Saivites in Klang Valley. The reliability value of Cronbach's alpha on the constructed instrument is 0.88. Such reliability value indicates that the constructed instrument may measure the beliefs and religious practices of the Hindu Saivites as well as their relationship to identity.


Introduction
Malaysia is made up of various races from different religious and cultural backgrounds. The religion in Malaysia consists of Islam which is the majority, recorded at 63.5%, followed by Buddhism at 18.7%, Christianity at 9.1%, Hindu at 6.1%, others at 0.9%, and unknown or no religion at 1.8% (Department of Statistics Malaysia, 2022). The diverse state of Malaysian people demands it society to know and understand the religions and cultures of other races in ensuring that national harmony can be sustained. Even though Malaysian society has been diverse for a long time and has been more apparent since independence, not everyone in Malaysia knows and understands the religion and culture of other races, particularly minority religions. Therefore, it is not surprising that there are sometimes racial conflicts over religious matters, specifically when there are issues of insulting and disrespecting other religious communities.
This study focuses on the Hindu religion practiced by the majority of the Indian community. Even though the Malaysian community is aware of the presence of Hinduism in Malaysia, few may know that this religion also consists of several sects where there are some differences in terms of beliefs and religious practices. Although there have been earlier studies on Hinduism in Malaysia, from the researcher's observation, there is still a lack of specialization in the sects present within this religion. Thus, this study examines the sect that is the majority of Hindus in Malaysia, namely Saivism, by focusing on their identity through beliefs and religious practices. Thus, an instrument for measuring the identity of Hindu Saivites through beliefs and religious practices was developed. The main objective of this study is to examine the validity and reliability of the questionnaire in measuring the Hindu Saivites' identity through beliefs and religious practices.

Methodology
This study applied a quantitative approach by using an instrument of questionnaire. The instrument for measuring the identity of the Hindu Saivites community through beliefs and religious practices was developed by the researcher. For the questionnaire, each construct and item developed to form the instrument are based on the theoretical and conceptual framework, previous literature as well as a reference to experts within the field of Saivism. The questionnaire consists of four sections, (A) demography; (B) beliefs of Saivism; (C) religious practices of Saivism; (D) Saivites' religious identity. The three constructs of beliefs of Saivism, religious practices of Saivism, and the Saivites' religious identity contain a total of 83 items. The measurement scale used in this questionnaire is a Likert scale where each item is measured with 5 scales namely (1) strongly disagree; (2) disagree; (3) neutral; (4) agree; (5) strongly agree.

Research Procedure
The study went through several stages. The first stage was to develop a questionnaire instrument through a theoretical and conceptual framework, past studies, and also preinterviews with experts. After that, the questionnaire developed by the researcher went through a process of validity and reliability.

Face and Content Validity
Validity refers to the ability of an instrument to test or measure what is supposed to be measured (Lynn, 1986;Ghazali and Sufean, 2018). There are several important forms of validity used in the study, and this study used face and content validity. Face validity, as mentioned by Ananda (2009), refers to several experts in his field who have been appointed to ensure that the constructed items accurately represent the measured constructions, such as the accuracy of language use, the spelling of sentence phrases, and so on. This validity is necessary for verifying that the item is clear, that the questions are asked in a reasonable amount of time, and that the item measures what should be measured (Arasinah et al., 2012). Furthermore, it assists researchers in identifying the likelihood of questions being misunderstood or misinterpreted early on (Zainuddin, 2015).
The number of experts required for face validity is not specifically determined, and previous studies have employed three, six, seven, and twelve experts (Aldridge and Galos 2017; Evers et al., 2017;Norhisham et al., 2017;Nuradli, 2019). According to Lynn (1986), the minimum number of experts for validation is three. For the face validity of this questionnaire instrument, it involved three experts consisting of an honorary professor from the Institute of Ethnic Studies and two Saivism religious experts. Both of the religious experts in Saivism are committee members of Saivism-based religious organizations. The selection criteria for experts are based on their areas of expertise in the field of ethnic social studies and also the Hindu religion of Saivism. Item evaluation was made on each item in the questionnaire in terms of appropriateness of the format of the instrument, clarity of the meaning of each item, use of easy-to-understand language, appropriateness of font size, clarity of instructions given, clarity of instrument objectives, and clarity of indicators for scale. Table 1.0 below shows a list of experts for face validity. Mrs. C Hindu Saivism In addition to face validity, content validity was employed to see how representative the items in the instrument were, of all elements evaluated as well as those that corresponded to the subject of the field of research wanted to be studied (Ananda, 2009). When it comes to a sample of items, content validity is important since it determines if they provide a sufficient operational definition of a construct (Polit and Beck, 2006). As for the number of experts used for content validity, it differs among the researchers. Some past researchers employed eight experts (Zhu et al., 2015), 13 experts (Wesolowski et al., 2017), and 16 experts (Kim, 2011). According to Lynn (1986), the number of experts necessary for research is adequate at five to ten. On the other hand, Lawshe (1975) recommends at least four expert panels. For this study, four experts were involved in content validity in which three comparable experts for the face validity test, and another expert who is a lecturer at the Research Center for Theology and Philosophy and also serves as the Deputy Dean of Research and Innovation. Table 2.0 below shows the list of experts for content validity.

Reliability of the Instrument
The reliability of an instrument in research describes the extent to which the scores in each item obtained in the questionnaire instrument are consistent or stable when used repeatedly (Ghazali and Sufean, 2018). The reliability of an instrument, in quantitative studies especially for the use of questionnaires, is attained by testing a group of questions (questionnaire) through a small-scale test known as a pilot test (Pratt, 1980). For this research, a pilot study was conducted involving the adherents of Saivism in the Klang Valley. The selection of a sample of respondents for the pilot study has met the same characteristics as the actual sample of the study. A total of 50 respondents who are followers of the religion of Saivism answered the questionnaire distributed through the online google form. The practice method of distributing the questionnaire online by applying google forms is used due to a pandemic situation of Covid-19 that occurs where it is difficult for researchers to face the respondents due to safety factors. As for the number of respondents, 50 people is adequate for the pilot study sample. As Johanson and Brooks (2010) suggested a minimum number of 30 people for a pilot study is enough for validity and reliability for an initial study, Mohd Yusri (2017) recommends that 30 to 50 respondents are suitable and ideal for the pilot study. To obtain the reliability of the questionnaire instrument, the data obtained from the pilot study were analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences software (SPSS). Generally, the reliability of a questionnaire instrument is measured by obtaining the value of Cronbach's alpha coefficient when the measurement scale for the questionnaire item has several options such as the Likert scale (Bolarinwa, 2015).

Results
The results of the reliability test using Cronbach's alpha internal consistency method are shown in the tables below.  Table 4.0 demonstrates the Cronbach's alpha for the construct of religious practices of Saivism that recorded the highest value for the item if deleted is 0.833 which is on the item 'I chant the mantra of "Namasivaya"' and 'I wear sacred ash (Tiruniiru) on my forehead'. Both of these items are maintained because this mantra is important in the religion of Saivism and the practice of wearing sacred ash on the forehead is a very significant practice among the followers of Saivism. Moreover, Cronbach's alpha has a high value of 0.832 and does not alter significantly if the two items are dropped. As for the construct of Saivite's religious identity, table 5.0 displays the highest value of Cronbach's alpha if the item deleted is 0.743 on the item 'The Tamil language is a language revealed by God'. This item is retained because the Tamil language is very important for the identity of Saivism believers especially those of Tamil nationality and this item has been suggested by Saivism religious experts to be included in the questionnaire instrument. Cronbach's alpha for all items in this construct of Saivite's religious identity is 0.729.  Table 6.0 demonstrates the Cronbach's alpha values for the entire items that include the construct of beliefs of Saivism, religious practices of Saivism, and the Saivite's religious identity. The overall Cronbach's alpha value is 0.88. This value indicates that all items have good reliability, and many researchers admit that values above 0.8 usually indicate very high reliability to be accepted especially for questionnaire items (Aiken, 1980;Cohen et al., 1960;Zaidatun and Salleh, 2003).

Discussion
This study was conducted to test the validity and reliability of the instrument for measuring the identity of Hindu Saivites through beliefs and religious practices in Malaysia. The expert validation and pilot test were conducted to test the validity and reliability of the instrument and the results showed that the instrument constructed can be accepted to be used in further research. The results showed Cronbach's alpha for the construct of beliefs of Saivism is 0.76, religious practices of Saivism is 0.83, the Saivite's religious identity is 0.73 and the value for the whole item is 0.88. As suggested by DeVellis (2017), the accepted Cronbach's alpha value is from 0.70 to 0.95. Meanwhile, there are other scholars such as Sekaran (1992) and Mohd Majid (2004) who think that a value of 0.60 is sufficient to maintain the consistency of the items. Therefore, the instrument that has been developed by the researcher is acceptable because it exceeds the value of 0.60. Furthermore, the value for the whole item is good which is 0.88. As mentioned before, a value that is above 0.8 shows very high reliability as agreed by (Aiken, 1980;Cohen et al., 1960;Zaidatun and Salleh, 2003). So, this instrument can be applied in real studies.

Conclusion
This study found that the instrument constructed is valid and reliable for use in the actual study based on the overall value of Cronbach's alpha which recorded a highly reliable score. Furthermore, the results indicate that the three constructs in this instrument, namely, beliefs of Saivism, religious practices of Saivism, and the Saivite's religious identity, are acceptable, and all items are retained. Hence the instrument is valid and reliable in measuring the identity of Hindu Saivites through beliefs and religious practices. The results also indicate that the instrument developed can be used among the Hindu Saivites population in Malaysia. For further research, future researchers may improve the study's results by performing another analysis such as exploratory factor analysis in evaluating construct validity since this study only involved face and content validity.