Students’ Local Cultural Identity and Its Assessment in Public and Islamic Junior High Schools

Considering local cultural identity is essential for school counselors who provide counseling services to junior high schools. For this purpose, counselors should use a valid and reliable instrument to measure such identity. This study aimed to design and validate the Local Cultural Identity Scale (LCIS) to support counseling services. By applying development research procedures, the study involved five school counselors who served as an expert panel in judging item content validity, followed by 20 and 685 junior high school students who gave responses for readability and construct validity. Various methods were used for data analysis, including the Content Validity Index (CVI) to assess content validity, Cronbach's alpha to test reliability, the item-item and item-total correlations, and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to evaluate construct validity. The initial item development process proposed 30 items across three dimensions. After evaluation by the expert panel, only 20 items met the criteria for content validation. A readability test was conducted with 20 respondents during the scale development stage, showing that these 20 items had good readability. The EFA revealed three factors for the LCIS: cultural pride, cultural knowledge, and ethnic group loyalty. The finalized version of the LCIS consists of 20 items. The study recommends that school counselors use the LCIS as an intentional tool to assess students' local cultural identities, ensuring that counseling meets individual needs.