RESEARCH PAPER
Soft Skills Scale for Administrators: A Validity and Reliability Study
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Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi, TURKEY
Publication date: 2023-12-31
Anatolian Journal of Educational Leadership and Instruction 2023;11(2)
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ABSTRACT
The aim of this research is to develop a scale to determine the soft skills of educational administrators working at universities. Regarding the ‘Soft Skills Scale for Administrators’, literature reviews and semi-structured interviews were carried out with the participants working at different levels at universities on the concept of soft skills. An item pool of 94 items was designed based upon the thematic analyses made as a result of the interviews. The number of items was reduced to 75 in line with expert opinions to ensure content validity. 300 instructors participated in Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) studies to find out the construct validity of the scale. The KMO value for the compliance of the data with EFA was determined as .983 and the Bartlett test value was 15184.46 (Sd=630, p=0.000). In the light of the EFA, it was seen that the rotated factor loading values ranged between .70 and .83 and explained 78.1% of the total variance of the scale. 39 items that did not comply with the condition that the load values in the factors in which the items were included should be .70 and above were eliminated from the raw scale. The final form consisted of 36 items. The scale items were collected under two factors as 'personal' and 'interpersonal'. For the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), data which were collected from a different sample of 384 instructors were analyzed. As a result of CFA analysis, goodness-of-fit indices (X²/Sd, NNFI, CFI, GFI, SRMR, RMSEA) were found to be good and acceptable. The Cronbach Alpha coefficient of the scale was determined as .99. The results showed that the data to be obtained from the ‘Soft Skills Scale for Administrators’ were statistically reliable and valid.