Measuring religious tolerance among final year education students: the birth of a questionnaire

Abstract

Given the fact that most societies worldwide are currently suffering from (serious) incidents symptomatic of religious intolerance, and since education can be regarded as one of the main instruments that society has at its disposal to combat this vice, it was decided to construct a questionnaire with which to measure the degree of religious tolerance prevalent among final year undergraduate students in education, that is, young people on the threshold of entering the teaching profession. The article begins with an outline of the problem of religious intolerance that many societies have to cope with. It then continues to discuss the “phenomenon” of religious tolerance, and after arriving at a working definition of tolerance describes how the proposed questionnaire was constructed and validated. The article concludes with an invitation to interested parties to join the authors in administering the questionnaire in their own institutions of teacher education, wherever they are.