Development of the Community Engaged Scholarship Self-Efficacy Scale

The purpose of this study is to develop an instrument to measure individuals’ community engaged scholarship self-efficacy through looking at the core competencies of community engaged scholarship. The instrument was tested for validity and reliability. This study was directed by the following research questions: 1) Are items on the instrument appropriate for measuring community engaged scholarship self-efficacy? 2) Do items on the CES-SE scale form distinct factors hypothesized during the instrument development phase? 3) To what degree are scores on the CES-SE measure reliable? Participants in this study were a target population of academics (professor, doctoral student, post-doctoral researcher, graduate student or university leader) in higher education. This study includes a convenience sampling of 213 participants. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was utilized to understand the relationship among the items in the CES-SE and to verify whether the hypothesized factors from CES competencies are accurate. It was determined that the model fit best supports retaining three factors. These results were not the factor structure that was hypothesized in the development stage of the CES-SE. However, the items on the CES-SE were found to be reliable and valid. Future research should include a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to confirm the model that emerged from this study.