Early childhood life skills scale: Scale development reliability and validity study

Abstract

The aim of this study is to develop a valid and reliable measurement tool to assess the life skills of 48-72-month-old children. For the draft scale consisting of 56 items, a pilot application was carried out with a study group of 152 children. The validity and reliability studies after the pilot application were carried out with 350 children in the 48-72 month-old group determined with simple random sampling method. According to the results of the KMO and Bartlett test of the scale, the KMO value was found to be .96. After the KMO values ​​were determined, analyses were performed to examine the distribution of the eigenvalues ​​of the scale items and the number of dimensions formed in the scale, and it was determined that the scale consisted of one dimension. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were applied to determine the construct validity. As a result of the exploratory factor analysis, it was seen that one dimension explained 47.24% of the total variance of the scale. When the fit statistics calculated by CFA were examined, it was seen that the previously determined single-factor structure of the scale was generally compatible with the collected data, while the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of internal consistency reliability was found to be 0.98. The results obtained from the study show that the early childhood life skills scale is a valid and safe measurement tool