One of the topics that we learned in class today was on social validity. Social validity can be measured in 3 dimensions:
- Social significance of the goals,
- Appropriateness of procedures, and
- Social importance of effectiveness.
The goals set for an intervention/treatment/programme should be the things that:
- the direct consumer (clients, e.g. child);
- indirect consumers (people who are directly in contact with the clients, e.g. the group who requested for the programme);
- the immediate community (e.g. teachers, extended family, neighbours); and
- the extended community (the society as a whole)
consider to be important. I’d elaborate furthur but I’m a bit tired. So I’ll trust your intelligence to grasp this concept. Then the procedures being used has to be feasable for the implementors of the intervention. They should like it. They should find it easy to implement. They should fell comfortable about delivering the programme. Despite what the data might show, the outcome of the treatment should be percieved as effective by the consumers and not by the researcher.
Why does social validity matter? Let me see. Would anybody want to use a treatment that they don’t think would be effective? Would you want to be wasting time investing and designing a procedure that is abandoned half way because the consumers didn’t like it, or didn’t think it was working? Do you want to use a programme that has a bad reputation?
So my question here is – does the religious “education” (schools, home, TV, Radio, etc) in Brunei have social validity? The question was sparked by today’s lecture (as you can see above), and also a blog post linked by Nisah (post can be read HERE). Here’s a little extract from the post:
How much I underestimated the importance of finding a masjid, a community, that welcomes, challenges and improves, instead of ignores, dulls and insults. We can tell people in our community, “You have to go to jumu’ah.” It is for men a fard. But what happens when the khutbah sucks, the Imam is lost, nobody understands anything and half the congregation, namely the youth, end up falling off and disappearing, because nobody cares and so, in cynicism, they do not care in a kind of wa ‘alaykum salam for forever.
With the increasing moral dilemma faced by Brunei, is anybody doing anything about it? For instance, if the strong encouragement to enroll into Ugama schools was meant to prevent or minimise moral conflicts in Brunei, why are the “social issues” increasing instead? Is there a decrease in the number of people attending ugama schools during the older and “better” times as compared to now? What’s the educational history of the people who have committed these “immoral acts”; did they used to attend or never attended ugama school? To take the question a little bit further – has this method (enrollment into ugama school) become ineffective, and has it become socially invalid?
In reference to the above quoted paragraph; if a majority of the jemaah never listen to the khutbah anymore, there has to be a reason (or even reasons) for this. The author mentioned about the way it’s delivered. Why don’t they try to find what the rest of the jemaah feel and think. Collect the data; take into account the comments by the jemaah and modify the different variables that might influence the likeliness of attending behaviour during the khutbah; then ask the jemaah again about the khutbah after the intervention.
This is the beauty of Islam – it marries religion with science. Islam doesn’t compartmentalise spirituality and science. So why can’t we use scientific methods to understand our community, to understand the problems faced by the society, and to find a solution for these problems? As long as it’s not against the syariah, it should be ok, right?
Right. I need sleep. I’m already doing half of my typing with my eyes close. Till then; peace.
