Alborz University

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Background and Purpose: Social media has important role in educational programs. This study aimed to psychometric of the attitudes towards social media learning scale.

Methods: This psychometric study included 119 participants from medical schools around Iran. The initial instrument was adopted from previous studies and had eight questions based on the Likert scale. The instrument verification procedure included examining the impact factor, the content validity index (CVI) and the content validity ratio (CVR) based on the judgment of 10 experts. Its internal validity was examined by an exploratory factor analysis. The internal reliability of the scale was determined by the Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient and the external consistency was assessed by using the test-retest method.

Results: In the initial scale, all of the 8 items were kept with an impact item index of over 1/5, the CVR over 0.62, and CVI of over 0.7. Based on exploratory factor analysis, all of the 8 items were maintained in the scale. Considering a minimum eigenvalue of 1 for each factor, the following three factors: communications in learning, reflective learning, and interactive learning were extracted. This instrument was capable of predicting 69.416% of the changes of the whole scale.

Conclusion: The results of this study indicated the strength of the factor structure and reliability of the instrument for measuring attitudes toward learning via social media. The results of study can assess students’ attitudes in this regard in universities and other educational institutes.

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Abstract

Introduction: Ethics in research is one of the most widely used categories of professional ethics. Research ethics focuses on the objective and partial cases of observing ethics in research and tries to solve the ethical problems of scientific research. The present study intends to survey the rate of observance of research ethics in medical research and design a questionnaire of ethics.
Method: This is a descriptive survey research. The statistical population included all the 20998 faculty members of the Ministry of Health and Medical Education and the statistical sample was 378 people who were selected to participate in the study using the probability method. The data collection tool was a self- constructed questionnaire resulting from thematic qualitative content analysis. The exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were used for data analyzing. Cronbach's alpha method was used to evaluate the reliability, and a statistical analysis of the results was done by SPSS and PLS software.
Results: The results of exploratory factor analysis showed seven factors equal to 60.170% of the variance. These factors were confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis by smart PLS software. The reliability of the questionnaire was obtained by Cronbach's alpha method equal to 0.915.
Conclusion: The final version of this 35 items questionnaire is approved by 7 factors (adherence to research ethics, consequences of research ethics, barriers to good behavior in research, institutionalization of ethics, individual principles, policy-making, and organizational ethics), and this valid and reliable tool can be used to measure the level of professional ethics in medical research.