Exploring Undergraduates’ Digital Citizenship Levels: Adaptation of the Digital Citizenship Scale to Turkish

This study reports the results of two successive studies on digital citizenship. ‘Study I’ aims to adapt the Digital Citizenship Scale, developed by Choi, Glassman and Cristol (2017), into Turkish context, and ‘Study II’ examines undergraduates’ levels of digital citizenship with respect to the variables of age, faculty, gender, amount of daily computer use, amount of daily smartphone use, and self-evaluations as to their skills levels of digital technology use. In Study I, the adaptation process of the scale, and validity and reliability analyses are provided based on data obtained from 272 undergraduates from 8 different universities in Turkey. A valid and reliable 18-item adapted form of Digital Citizenship Scale is offered in this part. In Study II, a survey design study, data were obtained from 220 undergraduates from a state university in Turkey and their digital citizenship levels were examined with respect to various variables. It was found out that the participating undergraduates had a medium level of digital citizenship, and they had the lowest mean in Internet Political Activism and the highest mean in Technical Skills. A significant difference between the undergraduates’ levels of digital citizenship was found only for self-evaluations as to their skills levels of digital technology use but not for the variables of age, faculty, gender, amount of daily computer use, and amount of daily smartphone use. Results are discussed, and implications are suggested.

[1]  S. Mulaik,et al.  EVALUATION OF GOODNESS-OF-FIT INDICES FOR STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODELS , 1989 .

[2]  Moonsun Choi,et al.  Teachers as digital citizens: The influence of individual backgrounds, internet use and psychological characteristics on teachers' levels of digital citizenship , 2018, Comput. Educ..

[3]  R. Lyons.  Investigating Student Gender and Grade Level Differences in Digital Citizenship Behavior. , 2012 .

[4]  Maria Laura Sudulich,et al.  Digital Citizenship, The Internet, Society, and Participation , 2008 .

[5]  Mike S. Ribble.  Digital Citizenship in Schools , 2007 .

[6]  Şevki Işıklı.  Digital Citizenship: An Actual Contribution to Theory of Participatory Democracy , 2015 .

[7]  Valerie Hill.  Digital citizenship through game design in Minecraft , 2015 .

[8]  Moonsun Choi,et al.  What it means to be a citizen in the internet age: Development of a reliable and valid digital citizenship scale , 2017, Comput. Educ..

[9]  S. Çiftçi,et al.  An Investigation of Pre-Service Primary School Teachers’ Attitudes towards Digital Technology and Digital Citizenship Levels in Terms of Some Variables , 2017 .

[10]  Shun Xu,et al.  Social media competence and digital citizenship among college students , 2019 .

[11]  P. Bentler,et al.  Significance Tests and Goodness of Fit in the Analysis of Covariance Structures , 1980 .

[12]  Andy P. Field,et al.  Discovering Statistics Using SPSS , 2000 .

[13]  Shun Xu,et al.  A Research on Factors Affecting College Students' Digital Citizenship , 2017, 2017 International Conference of Educational Innovation through Technology (EITT).

[14]  Martin Valcke,et al.  Internet parenting styles and the impact on Internet use of primary school children , 2010, Comput. Educ..

[15]  Abdulrahman M. Al-Zahrani.  Toward Digital Citizenship: Examining Factors Affecting Participation and Involvement in the Internet Society among Higher Education Students , 2015 .

[16]  Stuart W. Shulman,et al.  Digital Citizenship , 2004 .

[17]  Hasan Karal,et al.  Examining the Relationship between the Levels of Digital Citizenship and Social Presence for the Graduate Students Having Online Education. , 2018 .

[18]  Reshan Richards,et al.  Digital Citizenship and Web 2.0 Tools , 2010 .

[19]  Mike Ribble,et al.  Digital Citizenship for Educational Change , 2012 .

[20]  Cathy Oxley.  Digital citizenship , 2011 .

[21]  R. P. McDonald,et al.  Goodness-of-fit indexes in confirmatory factor analysis : The effect of sample size , 1988 .

[22]  K. Schermelleh-Engel,et al.  Evaluating the Fit of Structural Equation Models: Tests of Significance and Descriptive Goodness-of-Fit Measures. , 2003 .

[23]  Rolph E. Anderson,et al.  Multivariate Data Analysis (7th ed. , 2009 .

[24]  Özlem Canan Güngören,et al.  Being Digital Citizen , 2013 .

[25]  Min Kwon,et al.  The Smartphone Addiction Scale: Development and Validation of a Short Version for Adolescents , 2013, PloS one.

[26]  P. Bentler,et al.  Comparative fit indexes in structural models. , 1990, Psychological bulletin.

[27]  A. Feenberg.  The critical theory of technology , 1990 .

[28]  The Extent of Comprehension and Knowledge with Respect to Digital Citizenship among Middle Eastern and US Students at UNC. , 2017 .

[29]  Barbara M. Byrne,et al.  Structural equation modeling with EQS : basic concepts, applications, and programming , 2000 .