A STUDY ON DEVELOPING "DIGITAL EMPOWERMENT SCALE" FOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Nowadays, societies have been changed by rapidly developed digital technologies. The information explosion is experienced, and individuals / institutions should acquire digital empowerment. The concept of digital empowerment gains importance in the sense of both having digital skills and using them to their full potential. Digital empowerment refers to the ability of an individual to use digital technologies effectively in order to develop life skills and strengthen his or her capacity within the information society. The purpose of this study was to develop validate and widely applicable scale for university students to measure their digital empowerment. A scale with 45 items was constructed using a seven -point Likert anchored with notations 1 = strongly disagree, 7= strongly agree to design the instrument. The scale was conducted to 761 students. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and varimax rotation were carried out to determine the construct of the scale and it indicated the presence of four components. The internal reliability index, alpha coefficients, were adequate for the subscales (awareness, motivation, technical access and empowerment) respectively, 0.94, 0.84, 0.78, 0,81 and for the entire scale 0.86.