Democratic Citizenship Attitude Scale: A Validity and Reliability Study

Abstract

The aim of this study is to develop a scale with validity and reliability in order to measure the democratic citizenship attitudes of secondary school students. 59 item were identified in the direction of data obtained from student interviews, teacher interviews and literature review and reduced to 45 items with expert opinions. The created test form was applied to 374 students who attended a secondary school in Aydin, Turkey. As a result of the explanatory factor analysis (EFA), a structure consisting of six factor and 29 items was obtained: culture of democracy (CD), democratic participation (DP), duties and responsibilities (DR), democratic rights and equality (DRE), values of citizenship (VC), and global citizenship (GC). The model fit indices examined in the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) confirmed the EFA results. The significance of the differences between the 27% lower and upper groups was evidence that the scale was distinctive. Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient was employed to determine if there was evidence that democratic citizenship attitude scale (DCAS) and each subscale were internally consistent. Cronbach’s Alpha varied between .60-.79 for DCAS sub-scales and was .78 for the total score.