Development and Validation of an Instrument to Measure Secondary School Science Students' Social Capital Scale

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop a scale which will ensure that social capital levels of secondary school science students are determined. Validation and reliability works of the scale were performed on 304 (154 girls and 150 boys) students in North Cyprus. In the process of developing the scale, explanatory and confirmatory factor analysis were done, and reliability was determined with Cronbach alfa and split-half methods which are internal consistency tests. In addition to the Cronbach alfa and split-half tests, as the item total item correlations are sufficient, no item was excluded from the scale and it was confirmed that the scale was reliable. Results of confirmatory factor analysis show that the model belonging to social capital scale has perfect consistence and it consists of three dimensions such as trust in peer relations, communication intra-family relations, and sensitiveness in friendship relations.