Digital citizenship and its measurement: Psychometric properties of one scale and challenges for higher education

Abstract

The implementation of Internet use today makes it necessary to know with what purpose and what kind of practices developed in the virtual world the so-called digital natives that are already young adults of the current time. Starting from a broad conceptualization of digital citizenship, an instrument is selected to analyse such citizenship behaviours, such as the Digital Citizenship Scale by Choi, Glassman and Cristol as well as validating instrument in a sample of young Spaniards. The scale was translated into Spanish and consists of 26 items with a Likert type response format with 7 options. The sample consists of 206 students of different degrees from one Spanish public university. The psychometric properties of the scale have been analysed through factor analysis and reliability analysis by determining the Cronbach's Alpha (0.86). Regarding the instrument, it can be concluded that the Digital Citizenship Scale of Choi et al. is a valid and consistent instrument to study and measure the construct. From an educational perspective, there is a clear need to address aspects that are either directly proscribed, such as the use of mobile phones in college, the practices of digital citizenship present in the subscale of Internet Political Activism and other considerations that can promote digital citizenship education in higher education.