Assessing the Factor Validity of the Questionnaire "Creating a Distance Education System in Rural Areas" With Emphasis on Confirmatory Factor Analysis

Subject Areas :

Amir Hossein Oraki ¹ , Mahboubeh Sadat Fadavi ² , Narges Saeidian ³

1 - Ph.D. in Educational Management, Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran
2 - (responsible author) Assistant Professor, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran
3 - Assistant Professor, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran

Received: 2020-08-19 Accepted : 2020-10-24 Published : 2020-08-22

Keywords: confirmatory factor analysis, Distance Education, questionnaire, factor validity, rural areas,

Abstract :

The purpose of this study was to investigate the factor validity of the "Establishment of distance education system in rural areas" questionnaire with emphasis on confirmatory factor analysis. The research method was a series of exploratory explorations. In the qualitative part of the study, content analysis with inductive approach was used. Research environment in this section, 84 documents including 67 articles and books, 17 texts of interviews in the field of distance education that were selected as a sample, the components obtained in this research include 7 main components including management and leadership infrastructure, Economic infrastructure, technical infrastructure, educational infrastructure, socio-cultural and value infrastructure, organizational infrastructure and human infrastructure and 25 sub-components. The relative content validity coefficient was used to assess the validity and the Holsti coefficient was used to determine the reliability of the themes. The extracted reliability coefficient was 0.98 which indicated the high reliability of the themes. In the quantitative part, 290 members of the sample were selected by Cochran method and stratified random sampling method. The research tool was a 70-item researcher-made questionnaire. To evaluate the validity of the questionnaire, face, content and structural validity were used, and to assess its reliability, Cronbach's alpha with a value of 0.90 was used. According to the relative chi-square fit indices, adaptive fit, adaptive fitting and barbell, the model had a good fit. Finally, the factor validity of the "Establishment of distance education system in rural areas" questionnaire was confirmed using confirmatory factor analysis.