Awareness scale for safe use of information technologies for secondary school students

OpenAlex English

The aim of this research is to develop a valid and reliable measurement tool to determine the awareness levels of secondary school students towards using information technologies safely. The research was conducted within the framework of the survey model, one of the quantitative research designs. In the scale development process, a 55-item preliminary form, which was created by reviewing the relevant literature, was applied to 390 students and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was performed. As a result of EFA, the scale was reduced to a four-factor structure and reduced to 23 items. These four factors explained 50.210% of the total variance. The obtained structure was tested with Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) by applying it to a different sample of 512 students. The model fit values obtained as a result of CFA (χ²/sd = 2.019, RMSEA = .045, CFI = .924, TLI = .915, GFI = .927, AGFI = .910, IFI = .925) show that the model provides a high level of fit to the data. The factors were named as "Cyberbullying Awareness and Ethical Behaviours", "Healthy Technology Use", "Digital Security and Data Protection" and "Social Security and Seeking Support in Digital Environment" respectively. Cronbach's Alpha reliability coefficients were found between .601 and .861 for the dimensions and .893 for the overall scale. The findings reveal that the developed scale can validly and reliably measure the awareness levels of secondary school students towards safe technology use.