Adaptation of the Scale of Attitude towards Postgraduate Education into Turkish Culture and Examination of its Psychometric Properties

Abstract

This study aimed to adapt the Scale of Attitude towards Postgraduate Education (SATPGE) developed by Ng, Tuckett, Fox-Young and Kain (2014a) into Turkish culture by ensuring the structural validity and reliability of the scale in order to measure postgraduate students’ attitudes to postgraduate education. The study group consisted of 560 students who were registered to postgraduate education (i.e. PhD or Master’s) at University of Kahramanmaraş Sutçu Imam in Turkey. The programs SPSS 21.0 package and LISREL 8.7 were used to check the validity and reliability. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were performed to examine the validity of the model of the Turkish form of the SATPGE. The EFA results showed that a three-subscale 13-item instrument accounted for 55.12% of total variance explained. The subscales of the SATPGE were “Facilitator roles”, “Professional recognition” and “Obstacle factors”. The CFA results showed that three subscales for 13 items had a goodness of model fit (The fit indices of the model were: χ2 = 194, 67, df=62, χ2 /df= 3.13, RMSEA=0.069, S-RMR=0.051, GFI=0.93, AGFI=0.92, CFI=0.94, IFI=0.96, NNFI=0.92, NFI=0.91). Cronbach's alpha indicated that the internal consistency reliability of the scale was .84, and the test-retest reliability was found to be .82. In Turkey, a psychometric instrument is needed to measure the postgraduate students’ attitudes towards postgraduate education. Hence, in this study it is expected that the adapted scale will ensure the first step in psychometric response to this need by providing new models and suggestions to the relevant literature