VOLUME 12 ISSUE 1 SPRING 2026

144 Spirituality Studies  tered around the rational beliefs the participants developed with Islamic values (fitra, tazkiyat al-nafs), and the believing, utilizing, and the ‘e’ in the ‘t’ law of Islam rationally and empirically. In sessions seven and eight, the focus was also behavioral and the integration of values as action, and consolidation of learning. Module A (self-oriented meaning) focused on the individual’s personal, purposeful, and spiritually clear identity, while Module B (other-oriented) centered on social, community, and relational-valuable integration, with the Islamic doctrine of musical selection sustaining the varied themes. Treatment fidelity was maintained through: (1) an intervention protocol that was manualized and detailed for each of the sessions with objectives, scripts, and activities, (2) training facilitators in REBT and the session protocol, (3) the recording of the sessions for quality checks, and (4) supervision of sessions weekly to address any challenges during implementation and to align the activities across the different groups. 2.4 Measures Meaning in Life Scale. The main outcome was measured using an 8-item scale developed by the researchers. The scale consists of 2 dimensions, each containing 4 items, anchored on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree to 5 = Strongly Agree). The Self-Oriented Meaning (SOM) dimension focused on personal purpose, identity, and spiritual clarity (example item: “I have a clear understanding of my life’s purpose”). The Other-Oriented Meaning (OOM) dimension focused on social contribution and community service (example item: “My life has meaning through helping and serving others”). The scale was developed using a multi-step process: (1) item construction based on Islamic psychology frameworks and existing meaning scales in the literature; (2) expert review by Islamic psychologists and psychometricians; (3) a pilot study with 30 adolescents prior to the main study; and (4) item revision based on pilot feedback. Psychometric properties of the scale were systematically assessed across all three measurement points and are reported in Table 1. Internal consistency reliability, assessed via Cronbach’s alpha, was strong for both dimensions at all time points: SOM yielded α =.938 (pre-test), α =.922 (posttest), and α =.922 (follow-up); OOM yielded α =.928 (pretest), α =.889 (post-test), and α =.933 (follow-up). All values exceeded the conventional threshold of α ≥.70, indicating good to excellent internal consistency (Nunnally 1978). Item-total correlations ranged from .781 to .900 for SOM and from .707 to .861 for OOM across time points, confirming item homogeneity within each dimension. Test-retest reliability was estimated using the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC; two-way mixed effects, consistency type). ICC single-measure values were .790 (95% CI [.701.862]) for SOM and .764 (95% CI [.668.845]) for OOM at pre-test, indicating good reliability (Koo and Mae 2016). It is acknowledged that convergent and discriminant validity could not be fully assessed in the present study due to the absence of established external criterion measures in the same dataset. This limitation should be addressed in future validation studies with larger, independent samples. 2.4.1 Discriminant Validity of Subscales As a minimum corrective step requested to address the methodological concern regarding same-sample scale development and validation, Pearson correlations between the SOM and OOM subscales were computed at all three measurement points. Results are presented in Table 2. These correlations are uniformly high (r >.92) and warrant transparent critical appraisal. From a discriminant validity standpoint, correlations of this magnitude suggest substantial construct overlap between SOM and OOM, raising the question of whether the two subscales are measuring sufficiently distinct dimensions of meaning in life. By conventional psychometric standards, discriminant validity is typically considered problematic when inter-subscale correlations approach or exceed r =.85–.90, as such values indicate that the constructs share more than 70–80% of their variance (Kline 2011). Several interpretations merit consideration. First, the high correlations may reflect genuine psychological interdependence between self-oriented and other-oriented meaning within an Islamic collectivist context, where individual spiritual development and communal responsibility are theologically intertwined constructs rather than independent dimensions. Second, and more critically, the correlations may partly reflect methodological circularity: the scale was de-

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