Altruistic investment as a personal networking strategy: The development of scale and testing its constructive validity

Abstract

The article describes the process of verifying the constructive validity of the “Altruistic Investment Scale”. Altruistic investment is one of the networking strategies that allow scientists to consider the social behavior of an individual in terms of its involvement in the mechanisms of social capital formation and conversion. The results of the empirical research confirm the theoretical model and show that the developed scale corresponds to the components of the strategy, measured in an alternative ways. Testing of this hypothesis was carried out using structural modeling (n = 362). The reliability of the scale was 0.74 (Cronbach’s alpha, n = 670), the grades obtained by the scale do not depend on gender, are not related to social desirability, and correlate in the expected way with other scales of altruism and selfishness. The principal novelty of the construct of altruistic investment was demonstrated. In contrast to the construct of altruism, which is motivational by its essence, altruistic investment is a more complex concept and includes values and behavioral components as well. Moreover, the Altruistic Investment Scale doesn’t measure the ‘first-order’ altruism.