A STUDY ON VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY OF URBANITY AWARENESS SCALE

Abstract

Urban awareness has been an important concept for rapid urbanization in terms of cities. Urban managements don’t ignore requirements of urban individuals’ city-specific behaviors, integrating with physical and natural structure of city, individual’ feeling as part of that city, being aware of individual living in a city and behaving accordingly, joining active city life as an individual, showing sensitiveness and feeling responsibility towards that city. The purpose of this study was to develop valid and reliable survey to measure urban awareness. Participants were 81 female and 65 male, totally 146 individuals who accepted to attend this study voluntarily. Participants were living in urban city of Karaman province. They were selected from five neighborhoods representing characteristics of urban individuals. Survey method was used for data collection and easy sampling method was applied for participants’ selection. To checking validity and reliability of survey, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used. Exploratory factor analysis demonstrated that survey had four sub-domains which were “being urban/urban behaviors, being part of urban/state of belonging, following current affairs of urban/ social and cultural gains from urban”. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the validity of the survey and findings were consistent with four sub-domains. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that fit index values were RMSEA = 0.06, GFI = 0.79, CFI = 0.85 and x2 / df = 1.61. As a conclusion, findings of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses indicated that developed urban awareness survey was valid and reliable tool.