The Turkish Adaptation and The Reliability and Validity Analysis of The Personal Norm of Reciprocity Scale

Abstract

Reciprocity is a norm which suggests that people should reciprocate the negative and positive behaviors of others. This concept is widely used in both social psychology and other social sciences. In this study, The Personal Norm of Reciprocity Scale is translated into the Turkish language and its reliability and validity values are acquired. This scale consists of 3 sub-factors of 9 items, named Positive Reciprocity Norm (PRN), Negative Reciprocity Norm (NRN), and Belief in Reciprocity (BR). A survey is conducted on 328 college students and the structural validity of the scale is examined via an explanatory and a confirmatory factor analysis. The results indicated that 3 of the items failed to function as expected both in exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The rest of the items had expected factor loadings and the fit values of the models are satisfactory (χ²(116)=219, p<0.001, χ²/df=1.887, CFI=.908, RMSEA=.051, SRMR=.060 for PRN and NRN χ²(13)=32.1, p=0.002, χ²/df=2.47, CFI=.915, RMSEA=.066, SRMR=043 for BR). Moreover, as expected, the three sub-scales of the scales are positively correlated to each other. The reliability coefficient is .71 for PRN, .76 for NRN, and .62 for BR. Prosocial value orientation, a related construct, is only negatively related to the Negative Reciprocity Norm. These results indicate that the scale has satisfactory reliability and validity measures and it can be used to measure the individual differences in the levels of internalization of the norm of reciprocity.

Keywords

• the norm of reciprocity
• individual differences
• social value orientation