Teachers’ Perception of Equality Scale: A Study of Validity and Reliability

In this research Teachers’ Perception of Equality Scale (TPES) has been developed with the aim of measuring secondary school teachers’ perceptions of equality in their professions. In order to constitute the study group, 14 districts of the city of Istanbul were identified by using random sampling method and data have been acquired from 371 secondary school teachers working at secondary schools in these 14 districts. The data were acquired by using a TPES draft form on which 31 items were presented, and by using a personal information questionnaire that asked for demographic information under the titles of gender, teaching branch, years of seniority, education status and membership to a union. For the construct validity of the scale explanatory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed, and before these analyses were run, KMO Bartlett test was used to confirm item validity. For the crosscheck of the number of factors on the scale, Explanatory factor analysis (EFA) eigen values were compared to parallel analysis (PA) eigen values, and by extracting the factors whose EFA eigen values were lower than PA eigen values, it was proved that the number of the factors on the scale is four. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was carried out with a set of data acquired from a separate study group which is consisted of 273 secondary school teachers from Şişli district of the city of Istanbul. A form with 18 items that were created through EFA was used as a tool to acquire data for the CFA. According to the studies carried out so as to test the reliability of the scale, Cronbach Alpha internal consistency coefficient of the whole test is .87, Guttman Split Half internal consistency coefficient is .81 and test-retest correlation coefficient is .91. At the end of the studies, TPES has been developed with 18 items and four factors. Considering the studies on the field of equality in education have been centered on students rather than teachers, and also considering that these studies have mainly focused on the issue of equality of opportunities, the aim of this study is to fulfill a gap in the literature by developing a scale whose purpose is to measure the perception of equality among teachers.