Professional Anxiety among Religious Service Providers in Türkiye: Development and Psychometric Evaluation of a Measurement Scale.

This study presents the development and psychometric validation of a Professional Anxiety Scale for Religious Service Providers (PAS-RSP) designed to measure the anxiety levels of this professional group. The need for a rigorously constructed, field-specific measurement instrument arises from the documented inadequacy of existing general professional anxiety scales in capturing the unique cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions of anxiety experienced in religious service contexts. The study addresses this gap by developing and validating a 31-item, seven-factor Likert-type instrument with strong psychometric properties. In Türkiye, a total of 231 religious service providers, comprising imams, muezzins, preachers, and Qur’an course instructors, completed the scale. Data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics (Version 22). Reliability was assessed using Cronbach’s Alpha (α = .948), and construct validity was examined through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), supported by a Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) value of .906 and a statistically significant Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity (p < .001). The EFA yielded seven interpretable factors, namely professional social anxiety, professional management anxiety, personal life anxiety, professional success anxiety, religious fictional anxiety, profession’s effect on family, and family’s impact on profession. Together, these factors accounted for 70.7