Healing prayer as socio-psychological phenomenon: Example Yozgat

In this study, which examines the phenomenon of health-illness and the relationship between the perception of individuals on this issue and prayer, it is aimed at contributing to the Sociology of Religion and explaining the prayer attitude of individuals in the concept of secularity phenomenon to elaborate on the relationship between illness, prayer and healing in current socio-cultural structure, in the field of research, with sociological methods. This study, including a research model where the subjects of Health Sociology and Religion Sociology intersect, consists of three main parts. The first part includes conceptual and theoretical information, and the phenomenon of illness and health has been studied in terms of sociological aspects. The theoretical part of the research is explained with the theory of secularity. In the second part of the study, the research methodology is explained. In the implementation phase of the research, an application was performed on outpatients who applied to the City Hospital of Yozgat between February 15 and April 15 (2019), to conduct the validity-reliability study of Prayer Scale as a Healing Phenomenon. The sample of the study consists of 489 ambulatory patients aged 18-65. The data were collected through a face-to-face interview technique, with participants selected using a simple random sampling method. The survey, prepared by the researcher consists of questions related to the theoretical part of the study and organized by applying to the expert opinion. Content validity, pilot study, construct validity and reliability analyzes of the questionnaire were performed. SPSS was used to analyze the data. In the study, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were performed to check the construct validity of the "Prayer Scale as a Healing Phenomenon". Sufficiency of the sample group in AFA was tested with the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) coefficient and Barlett Sphericity tests. Varimax vertical rotation technique was used for factor analysis. Item Test Total Correlation and item discrimination values were tested. As a result of the analysis, a scale with 53 items with 8 factors was obtained. DFA was performed to determine the scale of consistency of 8 factors with total data. According to the DFA result, it was determined that RMSEA GFI, AGFI, RMR and SRMR values are in acceptable compliance and CFI, NNFI and NFI values are in perfect fit criteria. These results show that the described factor structure has been confirmed. Cronbach's Alpha = 0.890 has been determined as a reliable measurement tool. In order to understand whether there is a difference in prayer attitudes of the sample group according to demographic variables, 12 hypotheses were tested, and it was revealed whether the idea put forward based on the conceptual and theoretical framework of the research is supported by the findings. Statistical analysis of the data was conducted via t-test (Independent-Samples T Tests) and Variance Analysis (Analysis of Variance, ONE-WAY-ANOVA) tests and Scheffe analysis was used among Post-Hoc analyses to determine the source of the differences between groups. According to the research result; at the level of participants' seeing prayer as healing, their gender, marital status, age, education, the way of defining religious belief, the state of having a chronic disease, the condition of having chronic disease nearby, the frequency of praying, it has been determined that there are differences in attitudes to secularity according to the frequency of going to the hospital, the way they define their health, and the way of praying affecting secularity the person. Key Words: Prayer, Disease, Secularity, Healing, Yozgat