Validation Study on the Development of a College Students’ Publicness Scale

Objectives Based on positive organizational theory, this study developed and validated a scale to measure the degree of publicness focusing on college students' school life. Methods Questions were developed from the perspective of university students focusing on the main elements of the concept of publicness in positive organizational scholarship, and the main survey was conducted with a draft finalized through a Delphi survey and group interviews with experts. Afterwards, the validity and reliability of the scale were verified based on the data of 251 people in the main survey. Results First, as a result of developing the scale draft, 49 questions in the initial draft were extracted into 38 questions after a Delphi survey, and 40 questions were confirmed as the final draft through item modification in a group interview with experts. Second, as a result of the descriptive statistical analysis of the questions after the main survey, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted assuming normal distribution of the item response distribution and item discrimination at an appropriate level. When one heterogeneous factor item was deleted and the factor loadings of a total of 39 items were considered, The appropriateness of the four-factor structure was confirmed. Lastly, as a verification of the goodness of the finalized scale, a normal distribution was assumed in the item response distribution, and a significant difference was confirmed in the item differentiation between the upper and lower groups(p=.000). The overall reliability, which is the internal fit of the scale, was .982, and a significant correlation between sub-domains was confirmed in construct validity (p<.01), so a total of 39 questions of the college student publicness scale were verified as a reliable and valid scale. Conclusions Based on the concept of positive organizational research, a scale was completed to examine the concept of publicness among university students through validation.