Assessing the Prevalence of Extreme Middle-Eastern Ideologies among Some New Immigrants to Canada

The goal of this research was to investigate whether new immigrants from the extended Middle-Eastern countries differ from each other on issues related to extreme Middle-Eastern religious beliefs based on their religious identification. The Assessment and Treatment of Radicalization Scale (ARTS; Loza, 2007a), a scale designed to assess extreme religious beliefs originating from the Middle-East, was administered to a sample of 91 participants who had recently immigrated to Canada from Pakistan. The sample was comprised of Muslims (the majority of the participants) and a small number of Christians from the same background. Due to the small number of the Christian participants, Christian responses from previous studies were included in the present comparisons. Results indicated significant differences between the religious groups and were consistent with previously obtained results. Current results also support the use of ATRS as a reliable and valid measure to help with risk assessment for beliefs supporting violence

Assessing the Prevalence of Extreme Middle-Eastern Ideologies among Some New Immigrants to Canada

The goal of this research was to investigate whether new immigrants from the extended Middle-Eastern countries differ from each other on issues related to extreme Middle-Eastern religious beliefs based on their religious identification. The Assessment and Treatment of Radicalization Scale (ARTS; Loza, 2007a), a scale designed to assess extreme religious beliefs originating from the Middle-East, was administered to a sample of 91 participants who had recently immigrated to Canada from Pakistan. The sample was comprised of Muslims (the majority of the participants) and a small number of Christians from the same background. Due to the small number of the Christian participants, Christian responses from previous studies were included in the present comparisons. Results indicated significant differences between the religious groups and were consistent with previously obtained results. Current results also support the use of ATRS as a reliable and valid measure to help with risk assessment for beliefs supporting violence

The Validity of the Assessment and Treatment of Radicalization Scale: A Psychometric Instrument for Measuring Severity of Extremist Muslim Beliefs

The Assessment and Treatment of Radicalization Scale (ATRS) is designed to quantitatively measure Muslim extremists’ ideologies regarding risk areas that are reported in the literature. Utilizing the scale, in this study, using a convenience sample of 1769 from 10 countries (Australia, Canada, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Spain, and South Africa) responded to the ATRS. Results supported previous findings about the reliability and validity of the Assessment and Treatment of Radicalization Scale (ATRS, formerly known as Belief Diversity Scale BDS, Loza, 2007) for assessing Muslim extremists. Suggested cut off scores to use for identifying possible extremists are provided