The Alienation to Academicianship Scale Development: A Validity and Reliability Study

For academicians who have many roles such as scientists, researches, instructors, and administrators, academic alienation is an important problem for both their organizations and society, considering the functions of higher education. On the other hand, there is a limited number of studies on academicians, and it is clear that there are deficiencies in the structural validity of the available scales since the existing studies are only focused on the teaching function. In this study, a scale was developed in which various functions of academics can be combined in order to reveal how alienated academicians are towards their professions. The experiment scale consisting of 5-point Likert type and 58 items was administered to 535 faculty members working in 32 different faculties, colleges and vocational schools of 44 state universities in Turkey. As a result of the exploratory factor analysis carried out via the Promax rotation method, a 21-item structure with five sub-dimensions was created. The subdimensions are called "self-alienation", "alienation to scientific research", "alienation to teaching", "isolation" and "weakness". The Cronbach's alpha reliability for the whole scale was 0.867. The confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) findings from 488 observations support the validity of the scale. It was concluded that the scale is a reliable and valid instrument to measure the alienation of academics to their professions