Developing Perceived Competence Scale (PCS) for Adolescents

Abstract

In this study, Perceived Competence Scale was developed to measure high school students' perceived competence. Scale development process was verified on three different samples. Participants of the research are some high school students in 2011-2012 academic terms from Ankara. Participants' numbers incorporated in exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and test-retest reliability are respectively as follows: 372, 668 and 75. Internal consistency coefficients (Cronbach's and stratified a) are calculated separately for each group. For data analysis Factor 8.02 and LISREL 8.70 package programs were used. According to results of the analyses, internal consistency coefficients (alpha) are .90 - .93 for academic competence, .82 - .86 for social competence in the samples that exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis performed. For the whole scale internal consistency coefficient (stratified alpha) is calculated as .91. As a result of test-retest reliability, adjusted correlation coefficients (r) are .94 for social competence and .90 for academic competence. In addition to fit indexes and regression weights obtained from factor analysis, findings related convergent and discriminant validity indicate that competence can be addressed in two dimensions which are academic (16 items) and social (14 items).