Qur’anic Identity Formation Scale-QIFS Equivalence among Indonesian and Sudanese Muslim Youth: A Prototype Demonstration

Abstract

Cross-national research on Muslim youth identity requires evidence that an instrument measures the same construct across linguistic, educational, and cultural settings before national scores are compared. This article presents a methodologically bounded demonstration of the Qur’anic Identity Formation Scale (QIFS), a 24-item framework intended to examine how Qur’anic meanings become textual self-understanding, moral orientation, communal belonging, and lived practice. The supplied dataset of 800 respondents from Indonesia and Sudan is explicitly treated as a prototype, not as field-validated evidence. Prototype multi-group confirmatory factor analysis illustrates configural, metric and scalar steps, with limited deterioration in fit across models; however, item loadings, thresholds, reliability coefficients, confidence intervals, recruitment documentation and response-process data were not available. The article therefore reframes the contribution from empirical proof to a transparent validation protocol. It shows why translation, local partnership, cognitive interviewing, ordinal-data modeling, item diagnostics, and differential item functioning checks are necessary before QIFS can support substantive comparisons. The argument is deliberately cautious: QIFS is a promising, scripturally specific, process-oriented framework, but its incremental validity and cross-national equivalence must be tested through field observations. The scale should be used to understand contextually mediated Qur’anic identity formation, not to rank national populations or evaluate religious worth.