Validity and Reliability of The Turkish-Adapted School Participant Empowerment Scale (SPES) for Teachers with the PLS-SEM Approach

The importance of empowering school participants is increasing day by day. A school with empowered teachers can take more confident steps towards future education. Thus, it is important to determine the empowerment level of teachers as an important stakeholder of the school. The main purpose of this research is to adopt a measurement tool developed to determine the level of empowerment of school participants to Turkish school culture. For this, the School Participants Empowerment Scale (SPES) was used. The original scale has six factors (decision making, professional development, status, self-efficacy, autonomy, impact) and 38 items. There are n=108 teachers working in different types of public schools (preschool, primary school, secondary school, and high school) in the sample group of the research. Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) approach was adopted in the adaptation process of the scale. Smart PLS 3.2.8 program was used in the analysis of the research data. For validity and reliability on the data, 2nd level Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed by means of the Partial Least Square (PLS) method. At the end of the research; It was understood that the Turkish version of the scale generally preserved the original six-factor scale structure. But, it was determined that 9 items that could not fit the structural model should be removed from the Turkish version. The Turkish version of the scale adapted for teachers can be used in the context of Turkey as a six-factor and 29-item scale. Findings show that the scale exhibits good fit characteristics of the PLS-SEM approach.