The adaptation of Academic Major Satisfaction Scale to Turkish: The validity and reliability study

Abstract

Academic Major Satisfaction Scale (AMSS) was developed by Nauta (2007) with the aim of measuring the academic major satisfaction of students. The aim of this study is to examine the validity and reliability of the Turkish form of Academic Major Satisfaction Scale. The sample of the study consists of 321 college students studying at different departments of a state university at Western Black Sea part of Turkey. The construct validity of the scale, item analysis, test-retest and Cronbach Alpha internal consistency reliability coefficients were calculated in the study. The obtained data were analyzed by SPSS 20 and LISREL 8.7. Results and Conclusions: The studies were administered to 33 college students with one-week interval with the aim of determining linguistic equivalence, and the correlation between these studies were calculated as .76. In the study being administered to 267 college students for the construct validity of the scale, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted in order to determine the factor structure of AMSS. The results of the factor analysis revealed that the scale has one-dimensional structure as in the original form. Cronbach Alpha internal consistency coefficient for AMSS was found .83 and the coefficient ω designed for congeneric measurements was calculated and found to .835. Test-retest reliability coefficient was found .94. It was seen that the one-dimensional model fit well in the confirmatory factor analysis (x²=17.34, sd=7, p=.015, RMSEA=.075, CFI=.99, IFI=.99, GFI=.98, SRMR=.021). Item factor loadings varied between .35 and .87. It was seen that the corrected item-total correlation of the scale varied between .26 and .78. The test-retest reliability coefficient obtained with four-week interval was found .94 for the whole scale. These results show that the Turkish form of Academic Major Satisfaction Scale can be used as a valid and reliable measurement tool.