Operationalizing Istiqamah, Muraqabah, and Adab in Digital Education: Content Validation and Preliminary Psychometric Evidence

Abstract

Islamic psychospiritual constructs such as Istiqamah, Muraqabah, and Adab are frequently invoked in studies of Muslim learners, yet they remain under-operationalized in digital educational research. This study develops and content-validates an instrument that integrates these constructs with holistic digital well-being and holistic digital literacy for digital learning. Its distinctive contribution lies in operationalizing Istiqamah and Muraqabah as digital self-regulation and Adab as ethical digital comportment. An initial pool of 91 items was generated from theory and refined through a two-round expert-panel process into a 38-item instrument organized by an Input–Process–Output structure. Four experts evaluated the instrument across two rounds; the refined framework and all 38 items obtained an item-level Content Validity Index of 1.00, with scale-level indices of 1.00. Preliminary field evidence was subsequently obtained from an interim dataset of 202 eligible responses (195 complete cases). Internal consistency was satisfactory to strong for holistic digital well-being (α = .925), digital self-regulation (α = .865), digital Adab (α = .790), and holistic digital literacy (α = .925). The correlation matrix demonstrated excellent sampling adequacy (KMO = .930), with a significant Bartlett’s test of sphericity, χ²(703) = 5834.78, p < .001. These findings provide content-valid and preliminary psychometric support for further full-sample construct validation.