Designing and validating a scale measuring cultural capitals of Iranian university students majoring in English

Abstract

This study aimed to design and validate a Persian cultural capital scale (CCS) with Iranian university students majoring in English language, literature and translation as well teaching English as a foreign language. To this end, twenty more cultural capital indicators specified by researchers were added to eleven compiled by Khodadady and Zabihi (2011) and administered to 381 English students of five universities in Mashhad, Iran. When the data were submitted to Principal Axis Factoring and rotated via Varimax with Kaiser Normalization eight rotated factors whose Eigenvalues were one or higher were extracted, i.e., Cultured Family, Cultural Commitment, Cultural Investment, Religious Commitment, Cultural Visits, Literary and Art Studies, Art Appreciation, and Literate Family, indicating that cultural capital is not a unitary construct. The reliability and correlation analysis of the CCS and its underlying factors showed that they enjoy acceptable levels of reliability and correlate significantly with each other. The results are discussed and suggestions are made for future research. © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.