Determinants of communicating forgiveness among University students

Abstract

Forgiveness is encouraged in Islam as it helps to restore relationships among people. There are several ways that people usually used in forgiving others, but they differ from individual to individual. As such, this study examines the determinants of communicating forgiveness among university students. The specific objectives of this study are (1) to find out the level of forgiveness among IIUM students, (2) to identify ways of communicating forgiveness among students, (3) to identify different ways of communicating forgiveness across different demographic characteristics, (4) to identify different ways of communicating forgiveness across different personality types, and (5) to examine the relationship between ways of communicating forgiveness and religious commitment. The data were collected from 390 students from four kulliyyah (faculty), namely, Architecture and Environmental Design (AED), Engineering (ENGIN), Economics and Management Sciences (ENMS), and Islamic Revealed Knowledge and Human Sciences (IRKHS), using a stratified random sampling procedure. These kulliyyah were selected to represent two main educational streams in the IIUM Gombak Campus. Descriptive and Inferential statistics were employed to answer the objectives and to test the hypotheses of the study. Three general hypotheses were generated in this study. The first two hypotheses were to find out the differences between ways of communicating forgiveness across different demographic characteristics and across different personality types. The third hypothesis was to find out the relationship between ways of communicating forgiveness and religious commitment. The results showed that the level of forgiveness among the students is quite high and the commonly used ways in communicating forgiveness among them are the direct approach, the conditional approach, the spiritual approach, and the avoidance approach. However, it is found that regardless of demographic characteristics and personality types, the three main approaches in forgiving others are the direct approach, the conditional approach, and the spiritual approach. The avoidance approach is frequently used only among selected groups such as female students, younger students, undergraduate students, and Malaysian students. It is also found that ways of communicating forgiveness are positively related to religious commitment. In addition, the respondents were also asked to share their experience in ways of communicating forgiveness using openended questionnaire. The responses were content-analyzed. It is found that the content analysis results support the quantitative analysis.