The Construct Validity of the Scale of Audience Perceptions of Media and Religion

Abstract

This study is part of a doctoral dissertation (Al, 2019) at the Faculty of Communication, Istanbul University, Turkey, and it intends to introduce the Scale of Audience Perceptions of Media and Religion (SAPMR) and to measure its goodness-of-fit with a separate independent sample by deploying a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Data were collected from 150 participants, who ranged in age from 18 to 27 years, to measure whether the scale shows a good model fit. In the CFA, CMIN/DF, RMSEA, CFI, TLI, SRMR, PNFI, and PCFI fit indices were used. The fit indices obtained in the present study showed that CMIN/DF value was below 3, RMSEA value was below .06, SRMR values were below .08, CFI and TLI values were above .95, and finally PNFI and PCFI values are above .5. These results revealed that the SAPMR with six constructs –‘Media Ministers and Representation’, ‘Politics and Religion’, ‘Secularisation / Alienation from Religion’, ‘Perception of Religious Productions’, ‘Decoding in Opposition’, and ‘Religious Media Literacy’– had a good model fit; namely, its measurement model is well specified.