Citizenship Literacy: A Scale Development Study

Citizenship literacy scale is a scale developed to measure individuals' level of knowledge and interest in citizenship, their ability to use their right to seek rights, and to transform them into actions. The expressions in the scale were created by using other scales as a result of unstructured interview and literature review. As a result of the pilot application, a 34-item Likert-type scale form was created, and 1081 citizens of the Republic of Turkey over the age of 18 living in Turkey were included in the study. The citizenship literacy scale was passed through expert evaluation, and content validity was ensured, and explanatory and confirmatory factor analyzes were conducted to ensure construct validity. As a result of the analysis, it was seen that the citizenship literacy scale consisted of 29 statements gathered under 4 factors that explained 65,573% of the total variance. After the explanatory factor analysis, a t-test was performed for the mean scores of the lower group and upper group to determine the distinguishing feature of the items, and item correlation coefficients were calculated to reveal the relationship of each item with the scale. According to the independent sample t-test results, the significance level of all items was found to be 0.000, and the item correlation coefficients were found to be greater than 0.25. Pearson product-moment correlation analysis was performed to reveal the relationship between the factors of the citizenship literacy scale, and it was seen that each of the factors was positively and significantly correlated with the whole scale. After the explanatory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis was performed and the model's goodness-of-fit indices were examined. Goodness of fit values as a result of confirmatory factor analysis were as follows; χ2 = 1430,423; df=363, p= .000); χ2/df= 3.941; RMSEA = 0.052; SRMR = 0.051; GFI=0.912; AGFI=0.901; TLI= 0.944; CFI=0.950; IFI = 0.950; NFI=0.934; RFI=0.926. According to these values, it was understood that the citizenship literacy scale showed a perfect fit for CFI and IFI, and a good fit for χ2/df, RMSEA, SRMR, GFI, NFI, and RFI. Reliability analyzes of the citizenship literacy scale were also made, and Cronbach Alpha values were calculated. According to this; The cronbach alpha coefficient of the entire 29-item scale was found to be 0.931. In terms of the sub-dimensions that make up the scale, 0.925 for the information factor; 0.909 for the factor of interest; 0.888 for action factor; cronbach alpha values of 0.922 were reached for the entitlement factor. All the results obtained showed that the citizenship literacy scale developed is a valid and reliable measurement tool for measuring the citizenship literacy levels of individuals. Keywords: Citizenship, Citizenship Literacy, Scale Development, Validity and Reliability