Evaluating and Revising the Digital Citizenship Scale

Abstract

Measuring citizen activities in online environments is an important enterprise in fields as diverse as political science, informatics, and education. Over the past decade, a variety of scholars have proposed survey instruments for measuring digital citizenship. This study investigates the psychometric properties of one such measure, the Digital Citizenship Scale (DCS). While previous investigations of the DCS drew participants exclusively from single educational environments (college students, teachers), this study is the first with a survey population (n = 1820) that includes both students and the general public from multiple countries. Four research questions were addressed, two of which were focused on the validity of the DCS for this wider population. Our results suggest refining the 26-item five-factor DCS tool into an abbreviated 19-item four-factor instrument. The other two research questions investigated how gender, generation, and nationality affect DCS scores and the relationship between the different DCS factors. While gender was found to have a minimal effect on scores, nationality and age did have a medium effect on the online political activism factor. Technical skills by themselves appear to play little role in predicting online political engagement; the largest predictor of online political engagement was critical perspective and a willingness to use the Internet in active ways beyond simply consuming content.