Developing and Validating a Scale for Measuring Sexual Harassment in Higher Education

Abstract

This research develops and validates a measurement scale for sexual harassment in higher education using Churchill's criteria for scale development to better understand the experience of young female faculty members. For this purpose, the researchers used a sequential mixed methods approach. Following a critical review of the literature, in-depth interviews were conducted with young female faculty members who are in the early stages of their academic careers. The results informed the design of the research instrument, pretested with a small sample of young female faculty members, and then self-administered to a larger sample of young female faculty members. The data were initially analyzed using exploratory factor analyses before being validated through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The three dimensions of the final scale: the extent of the risk, weight of culture, and acts of sexual harassment showed good reliability values of 0.838, 0.816,0.821, respectively. The final scale also showed a satisfactory convergent validity value for the first dimension “0.53”, the second dimension “0.56”, and the third dimension “0.55”.The scale paves the way for future research and awakens the audacity of researchers to better understand the experience of female academic staff, especially young female faculty members.