Development and Validation of News Addiction Scale

Abstract

The current study was undertaken in order to construct a psychometrically sound measure of news addiction for Pakistani people. The research comprised of three studies. The first study dealt with the development of News Addiction Scale (NAS) for Pakistani people. The items of the scale were empirically determined for content validation and an exploratory factor analysis was undertaken on a purposive sample of 247 individuals (men = 183, women = 64; with a mean age of 40.1 years, SD = 15.2 years). Thirty items were subjected to Principal Axis Factoring and the resulting scree plot and Eigenvalues evidenced a single factor solution with 19 items, which accounted for 53.96% of the variance. In the second study, a confirmatory factor analysis was carried out on a sample of 240 participants and the results revealed an excellent model fit to the data, which validated the unidimensional structure of the scale. Study III of the present research was conducted on a purposive sample of 100 individuals and it provided a convincing evidence of convergent validity of the scale as significant positive correlation was observed between news addiction and behavioral activation and concurrent validity as individuals with more duration of exposure had significantly higher mean score on the NAS. Across the two studies, the Cronbach alpha of the scale remained ≥ .90. These pieces of evidence suggested that NAS would be a promising indigenous measure of news addiction.