Validating Measures for Community Factors, Facebook Intensity, Individual Differences, Social Capital and Academic Performance among University Students

Abstract

This study was carried out to validate the measures for community factors, face book intensity, individual differences, social capital and academic performance of university students. A factor analysis was carried out with reliability test to determine whether the measurements had construct validity and reliability. In this regard, the instrument were administered to 100 undergraduate students in Sirte University. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted for all items measuring the constructs which include Community factor (interacting with peers, interacting with lecturer and engaging with students), face book intensity (emotional connection, face book friends, time use on facebook); Individual differences; academic performance and social capital. The principal component analysis (PCA) was used to perform exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to find uncorrelated linear combinations of observed variables. The result of the analysis confirmed that Community factor has three dimension: interacting with peers, interacting with lecturer and engaging with students; face book intensity also has three dimension; emotional connection, face book friends, time use on face book. The loadings of all the retained items are above the threshold value and the Cronbach alpha of all the constructs are also above .8 which shows that the instrument is valid and reliable and thus, can be adopted by future researcher.

Keywords: Community factors, Facebook intensity, Social capital, Academic performance