Teacher’s Professional Perception as a Predictor of Teacher – Student Friendship in Facebook: A Scale Development Study

Abstract

In this study, a scale was developed for providing to make a relation between the tendency and reasons of teachers to add their students as “Friend” on Facebook and their professional perceptions. The study group consists of 158 teachers; 81 of them state that they are “friends” with their students on Facebook and 77 of them state that they are not. The factor structures of the scale were determined through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and the aforementioned theoretical structure was tested through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). The results indicate that each sub-scale separates into 4 factors that have an eigenvalue of 1 or above and that they have construct validity and reliability. Depending on the fact that both sub-scales had 4 factors, the aim was to find a common structure among the sub-scales. Regarding the meanings that the related items had, it was found that both sub-scales consisted of sub-factors that could be described as responsibility perception, student perception, professional identity perception and school perception. A secondarylevel confirmatory factor analysis was applied to validate the structures that were determined at the sub-scales and to test whether responsibility perception, student perception, professional identity perception and school perception structures inclined to an upper structure, i.e. teaching perception, or not. The findings indicated that both sub-scales had this hierarchical structure and each model had acceptable goodness-of-fit values. The survey developed a structure that had strong psychometrical features and determined that teachers’ interactions with their students on social networks were related to their professional perceptions.