Yasir Kurt

Department

Counseling and Human Services

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Date of Award

7-2017

Degree Level

Ph.D.

ISBN

9780355415193

Proquest Document ID

1987572414

Identifier

ETD2017Kurt

School/University

St. Mary's University

Size or duration

x, 183 pages

Document Type

Dissertation

First Advisor

Montilla, Romulo Estaban

Second Advisor

Karcher, Michael J.

Third Advisor

Wong, Christine

Abstract

Adolescent connectedness has been studied by researchers around the world because of its positive associations with academic, behavioral, and emotional indicators of positive youth development. Researchers in several countries also have found that it could serve as a protective factor against several health risk problems. The Hemingway: Measure of Adolescent Connectedness is one of the few assessment tools to measure connectedness across the adolescent social ecology, capturing connectedness in school and at home, in the present and in the anticipated future. The need for such instrument is particularly great in Turkish society where the scarcity of such psychometric scales constrains the development and evaluation of youth development programs. The purpose of this research study was to examine the validity evidence for the use of the Turkish Hemingway: Measure of Adolescent Connectedness (T-MAC). A survey research design with a sample of 245 Turkish adolescents was used to analyze internal consistency and validity evidence of the T-MAC following the guidelines of the International Test Commission and the Standard for Educational and Psychological Testing. The guiding research questions specifically focus on estimating the internal consistency among subscale items for all T-MAC subscales in terms of Coefficient Alpha and the convergent and discriminant validity evidence for five subscales of T-MAC (Connectedness to School, Teachers, Parents, Peers, and Self) for which there are Turkish translations of reliable assessments of similar constructs. The data were analyzed using IBM SPSS 24.3 to generate descriptive and inferential statistics to answer these questions. The results suggest that the T-MAC showed acceptable internal consistency for all but three subscales, Connectedness to Teachers, Peers, and Self-in-the-Future. Five other subscales of the T-MAC (Connectedness to School, Teachers, Parents, Peers, Self-in-the-Present) yielded strong validity evidence and internal consistency. Some mean differences across gender and developmental groups were found and are discussed. Finally, exploratory analyses were conducted of specific items that did not have adequate internal consistency in the two subscales, which also did not show consistency with the original MAC, are discussed as well.

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