Development of Disaster Awareness Scale: A Validity and Reliability Study

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to develop a disaster awareness scale to determine the disaster consciousness of teacher candidates. The study group consisted of 820 preservice teacher who studied in different departments of Kırşehir Kırşehir Ahi Evran University Faculty of Education in the 2016- 2017 academic year. Of the pre-service teachers in the sample, 74.3% were female, and 25.7% were male. The initial state of the scale created after the scanning of the relevant literature consisted of 50 items. As a result of expert opinions, the number of items was reduced to 46 and applied to the working group. An exploratory factor analysis was performed to determine the validity of the scale, and item factor total correlations and substance discrimination values were calculated. The internal consistency level and stability levels were calculated in order to determine the reliability of the scale. This left 46 items, but the factor loads of 10 items were below 0.30. Thus, they were removed from the scale. As a result, the final scale has a total of 36 items, of which 27 are positive and 9 are negative; and consists of 4 dimensions, called “disaster education awareness”, “pre-disaster awareness”, “false disaster awareness” and “post-disaster awareness.” As a result of the analyses made, it was determined that the scale is valid and reliable and can be used to determine disaster awareness levels.