Development of Youth Digital Citizenship Scale and Implication for Educational Setting

Digital citizens need comprehensive knowledge and technological accessibility to the internet and digital world and teachers have a responsibility to lead them to become digital citizens. However, existing Digital Citizenship Scales contain too broad ranges and do not precisely focus on the target students, so teachers do not have clear criteria for facilitating young people to have digital citizenship, which leads to problems in the direction and goals of digital citizenship education. This study aims to clearly identify the Digital Citizenship Scale for adolescents perceived by teachers who are responsible for their students’ digital citizenship education and to present the needs and direction of school-based education to satisfy the identified Digital Citizenship Scales. A five-factor Digital Citizenship Scale called S.A.F.E model, meaning leading character of Self-identity in digital environment, Activity in online(Reasonable Activity and Social/cultural engagement), Fluency for the Digital tools, and Ethics for digital environment, was derived through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and further cross-validated through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) with 200 pre-service teachers and in-service teachers. The S.A.F.E model, derived by teachers, shows high reliability and construct validity to be used as a digital citizenship scale for students through concept analysis, EFA, and CFA verification. Based on the theoretically rigorously derived SAFE model, the educational requirements and direction to become active and critical citizens in the online community were discussed.