Online-ready? Factor structure and internal consistency of a scale to measure students’ online journalism self-efficacy

Abstract

With the integration of social media in journalism practice, media training institutions must focus on preparing future media professionals with the right mix of digital skills for the industry. Although efforts to improve students’ online skills readiness are evident in schools, no reliable tool exists to assess students’ confidence in doing online journalism tasks upon graduation. This study develops and validates an Online Journalism Self-Efficacy Scale (OJSES) that can be used to measure mass communication students’ perceptions of their self-efficacy for online journalism work. Items for the proposed scale were developed from a comprehensive literature review and refined by eight online journalism professionals (five online journalism lecturers and three online news editors). To explore the factor structure of the tool, exploratory factor analysis of data from a sample of finalist undergraduate mass communication students (n = 182) in five Rwandan universities was done. Results suggested that the OJSES is a five-dimensional tool that comprises 27 items. This scale measures online journalism self-efficacy in terms of students’ capabilities to conduct online journalism research, communicate with social media tools, create and share multimedia content online, observe ethical online publishing and use social media to solve organizational problems. The scale demonstrated reliability with a Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.785 and the five self-efficacy dimensions explaining 51.1 per cent of the total variance. The scale’s psychometric soundness implied its suitability not only to empirically measure the students’ confidence in working in online environments but also guide capacity-building for the required online skills for the media industry.