Psychometric Evidence for an Abbreviated Version of the Online Student Connectedness Survey in the Japanese Population

The Online Student Connectedness Survey (OSCS; Bolliger & Inan, 2012) entered the literature in 2012 under the rationale of addressing limitations with existing instruments focused on community in the learning environment. Evidence for validity was based on exploratory factor analysis and was therefore not confirmatory. The lack of confirmatory evidence was partially addressed by Zimmerman and Nimon (2017) in a study advancing an abbreviated version of the instrument, in addition to examining concurrent validity with other theoretically related instruments. The study reported in this paper extends this line of research to the Japanese population by using confirmatory factor analysis to 1) test the model for the original full version of the OSCS for the first time in any population, 2) test Zimmerman and Nimon’s abbreviated version of the instrument for the second time, and 3) arrive at a rival abbreviation that produces scores with better psychometric properties in the Japanese population. The model for the original full version was rejected in the Japanese population as was Zimmerman and Nimon’s abbreviated model although it performed better than the full version. Our rival abbreviated model was accepted.