A Development, Validity and Reliability of Safe Social Networking Scale

Abstract

Social networks has become in the spotlight for millions of people since they create a dynamic and rich interaction environment between users, and allow free access and usage of fake identity information. Distance education and working from home around the world due to COVID-19 pandemic has affected the increase in the rate and duration of social media usage in the last year. Unfortunately, this increase has offered criminals, who have the potential to pose risks and dangers on social media, more opportunities. Therefore, it has become even more important to use social media as a safe environment. The objective of this study was to develop a Safe Social Networking Scale for determining the security levels in social network usage. The validity and reliability studies of the scale were conducted with 585 social media users. As a result of the validity study, 28 items under five factors were obtained. These factors were being “Time Tunnel/Wall Sharing”, “Safety of Social Network Profile Information and Sharing”, “Social Network Friends List and its Safety”, “Safety of Social Network Information Input”, “Safe Login to Social Network Account”. The items obtained were capable of discriminating the individuals in terms of the features to be measured by the scale. There has not been any scale that directly determines the level of safe use of social media in the literature. The developed scale is expected to fill this scale gap in the literature.

Keywords

• safety
• social networks
• scale development
• reliability
• validity