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The Reliability and Validity of the ‘Smiley’ Scale
Author(s) -
Davies Julie,
Brember Ivy
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
british educational research journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.171
H-Index - 89
eISSN - 1469-3518
pISSN - 0141-1926
DOI - 10.1080/0141192940200406
Subject(s) - smiley , psychology , internal consistency , reliability (semiconductor) , scale (ratio) , test (biology) , test validity , validity , developmental psychology , psychometrics , geography , paleontology , power (physics) , physics , cartography , quantum mechanics , computer science , biology , operating system
The ‘Smiley’ scale was devised to measure primary school children's attitudes to school as part of the Junior School Project by the Inner London Education Authority in 1986. It appeared potentially useful, in both content and format, for our purpose. It was found that no reliability or validity study had been carried out on it. To rectify this, one was done. Internal consistency reliability was found to be satisfactory when tested on 641 Year 2 and 585 Year 6 children. Test‐retest reliability was considered by readministering the scale to 172 Year 2 and 155 Year 6 children after a 1 week interval. The Year 6 children showed more consistency in their responses than the Year 2 children. The correlation coefficients of the totals on the two occasions were 0.71 and 0.87 respectively. The validity of 172 Year 2 and 167 Year 6 children's responses was tested by comparing them to the teachers' perceptions of the children's attitudes using the ‘Smiley’ scale. Results showed very few significant correlations between the children's and teachers' responses for the Year 2 children although there were more significant correlations for the Year 6 children. This may be due to teachers' lack of awareness of children's attitudes to school.