A Novel Scale for Evaluating Digital Readiness toward Earthquakes: A Comprehensive Validity and Reliability Analysis

Abstract

New digital technology trends have the potential to mitigate the effects of earthquakes and improve response and recovery efforts such as earthquake prediction, emergency call-out, and earthquake location notification. Earthquake readiness makes it necessary to have a digitally prepared society. However, no scale has been found in the literature that can measure the digital attitudes and skills of individuals regarding earthquakes. For this reason, to fill this gap in the literature, this descriptive research study aimed to develop an original, valid, and reliable scale to determine the digital readiness of individuals toward earthquakes. Data were collected from 621 adult individuals with different socioeconomic characteristics using the convenience sampling method. An item pool was created through a comprehensive literature review, followed by a series of analyses encompassing content validity, construct validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity, criterion-related validity, reliability analysis, and item analysis in the course of the scale’s development process. For the digital readiness toward earthquakes, the Draft scale, with 21 items remaining, a KMO value (0.894), and a Bartlett sphericity test result of χ2 (91) = 2407.76 (p < 0.001) showed the suitability of the data for exploratory factor analysis (EFA). As a result of the EFA, 14 items were categorized into two dimensions based on whether their eigenvalues exceeded 1. The explained variance was 46.823% (eigenvalue = 6.555) in the first factor, while it was 12.832% (eigenvalue = 1.796) in the second factor, and the total variance was 59.655%. After analyzing the scale’s items within these dimensions, the first dimension was named “Technological Skills”, comprising eight items, and the second dimensions was named “Digital Attitudes”, consisting of six items. The factor loadings for these items ranged from 0.562 to 0.900. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) affirmed the factorial structure identified by the EFA. For the five-point Likert-type Digital Readiness toward Earthquakes scale, named the DRE scale, with 14 items after validity analyses, Cronbach’s alpha value was obtained as 0.910, demonstrating high internal consistency. Cronbach’s alpha values of the two factors were 0.910 for the “Technological Skills” dimension and 0.837 for the “Digital Attitudes” dimension. It was concluded that the developed scale is a valid and reliable measurement in evaluating the digital readiness of individuals toward earthquakes.