The scale comprises self-consciousness that is sub-divided into physical appearance, outings, material possessions, and political/cultural awareness. The second component is the validity scales composed of the convergent validity (perfectionist self-presentation scale), discriminant validity (Rosenberg self-esteem scale), and criterion validity. Self-consciousness on social media shows the individual awareness on the social media depending on the physical appearance, outing, material possession, and political/cultural awareness. The self-presentation scale displays how individuals present themselves when using various social media sites.
The self-esteem scale shows how social media users feel about themselves every time they are using social media. Criterion validity offers the personal recommendation on their mental health performance. The scale measures the self-consciousness, mental performance, self-esteem, and self-presentation of individuals who use social media. The scale is composed of 47 items, and the reversed items are 8. The response to the changed items is consistent with the data.
The Cronbach’s alpha for reliability is 0.788. The Cronbach’s alpha is high, which indicates higher consistency. The validity value for convergent is -0.37, for discriminant is -0.62, for criterion is 0.271, and the p-value for criterion validity is 0.078. The Cronbach’s alpha for the variable is good as they all above 0.78. However, the results for the convergent validity require improvement. The problem is generated from the items that have low correlations.
Table 1.0: Social media Cronbach’s alpha.
Table 2.0: Correlations.
The items that have the worsts reliabilities are 8, 13, 16, and 17. This is because the question that was being asked tend to be unrelated leading to the peculiarities in the test results of the items. The items are clustered in the same area leading to low total correlations. With the removal of the above items, Cronbach’s alpha has increased to 0.824. The convergent validity has been reduced to -0.053. The discriminant validity has increased to -0.019, and the criterion validity has risen to 0.296. These results imply that the psychometric sound has become worse.
Table 3.0: Cronbach’s Alpha test.
Table 4.0: Correlations.
Implementation of the Item difficulty index is essential in ensuring that correct answers are given to the questions set. The higher the value of the item difficulty index, the easier the question. Furthermore, this index has a crucial role in the ability of the item to discriminate between the students who are aware of a particular item and those who are not. The discrimination index will be very low when the item is very difficult or very easy that almost every research participant is getting it right.
Another criterion validity variable that can be incorporated into the research study is the social anxiety measurement that the social media users rate themselves every time they are using social media sites. A research study on the effect of Instagram use on self-esteem shows that Instagram alone does not directly influence the self-anxiety of individuals (Jiang & Ngien, 2020). However, its effect is impetus by self-esteem and social comparison (Jan et al., 2017).
References
Jan, M., Soomro, S., & Ahmad, N. (2017). Impact of social media on self-esteem. European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 13(23), 329. Web.
Jiang, S., & Ngien, A. (2020). The effects of Instagram use, social comparison, and self-esteem on social anxiety: A survey study in Singapore. Social Media + Society, 6(2). Web.