Assessing the Digital Mindset - Using Explicit Scales to Measure an Implicit Phenomenon

Abstract

The ‘digital mindset’ is frequently raised by both researchers and practitioners to be an essential factor of the human side of digitalization to successfully cope with the arising challenges of digitalization. Despite existing conceptualizations of the construct, the literature provides no operationalization usable for quantitative research, so far. Our research pursues the goal to address the question of how the digital mindset can be measured. Using a multi-method approach, a literature- and Delphi study-based initial scale has been developed and empirically validated with 156 and 147 participants was developed. Based on this initial scale, we developed to further survey scales and a structured interview approach as alternative measures for the digital mindset. In a pilot-study with 18 participants, the correlations of the answers from using the different measures indicates that the developed survey scales can serve as quite accurate proxies for the qualitative approach, which is assumed to measure the ‘true’ level of the digital mindset. In the future, researchers can choose from different scales based on their requirements for precision and efficiency (i.e., time needed to complete the survey items).