Faculty and Staff Publications

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Browsing Faculty and Staff Publications by Author "Dr. Mahlon, Juma"

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    Biblical Narratives of Steadfast Grit: A Select Example in Cultivating Psychological Fortitude
    (Pan-African Journal of Theology, 2024) Dr. Mahlon, Juma
    Psychological grit is credited to Angela Duckworth. Psychologists have investigated grit as a personality trait, educators as a character trait, and economics as a non-cognitive competence or soft skill. Additionally, it has been translated into Russian, Japanese, German, Korean, Turkish, and Spanish. However, the attributes associated with grit, such as courage, conscientiousness, excellence, resilience, and optimism, are similar to Bible terminology. However, the literature is scarce, and there is a knowledge gap about these characteristics from a biblical standpoint. Critics have proposed that future studies look into the useful applications of grit in educational contexts and other languages. In response, the story investigated the following issues: (1) What words do the New and Old Testaments use to describe grit’s courage, conscientiousness, excellence, resilience, and optimism? (2) Who are the Biblical characters who demonstrated these virtues? The analysis revealed that grit is an abundant biblical attribute in both the New and Old Testaments. Countless Bible characters demonstrated grit. Distressing end-times call on Christians to display grit.
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    Development and Validation of Domain-Specific Grit Scale for Prisoners in Criminal Justice System in Kenya
    (International Journal of Resaerch and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS), 2024-12-10) Dr. Mahlon, Juma
    Grit – defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals has been considered a prognosticator and requisite trait of success and achievement and has been utilizing the domain-general Grit-S - for its good internal consistency, and test-retest stability. The domain-specific aspects of grit are required and a valid tool has been an imperative need. This quantitative study introduced the Prison Grit Scale (P-GS) to recidivists (N =418) selected through purposive and systematic random sampling to ascertain the reliability and validity using the partial least squares structural equation modeling. The results demonstrate that P-GS possesses good psychometric properties. The factor loadings of courage, conscientiousness, excellence, resilience, and optimism were between 0.754 - 0.836, thus acceptable. P-GS’s composite reliability of 0.895 is acceptable; a value greater than the recommended 0.70, and the rho-a value of 0.857 falls between Cronbach’s Alpha (0.853) and composite reliability (0.895). The convergent validity’s average variance extract was 0.631; above the accepted threshold of 0.50. Lastly, discriminant validity using Fornell and Larcker indicator loadings scored 0.794 and fell between 0.65 and 0.85. The conclusion is that P-GS has good internal reliability and convergent and discriminant validity. This implies the support of domain-specific aspects of grit and can benefit positive psychology researchers in the criminal justice system. A convergent parallel design in a mixed method is recommended for future research, utilizing more women respondents