Development and Validation of Alienation Scale for Secondary School Teachers to Find out Gender Differences in Alienation

Abstract

Alienation is a psychological state in which a teacher feels and develops relatively loss of relationship with others. First and foremost, in the present study, it was found that the standardized Alienation Scale by Hardeo Ojha constructed in the year 2010 was appropriate in measuring alienation in general social context for adults above twenty one years of age and it required a few modifications to cater specifically in terms of secondary school teachers context which led to further developing and validating alienation scale on secondary school teachers. The psychometric properties of alienation of secondary school teachers were explored. The study assessed the level of alienation dimension-wise of two hundred secondary school teachers teaching in Punjab (India). The scale was made reliable and valid using Content validity, Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Cronbach’s alpha, Average Variance Extracted, Composite Reliability. The reliability statistics using Cronbach’s alpha is greater than 0.80 of overall alienation scale (α=.878), social isolation (α=0.892), work alienation (α=0.869) and cultural estrangement (α=0.875) with average variance extracted greater than 0.40 and composite reliability greater than 0.70 for all the factors. Therefore, validity and reliability analysis showed that the scale possesses adequate homogeneity and internal consistency. Thus, the alienation scale can be considered appropriate to measure level of alienation of secondary school teachers. Secondly, for field testing the applicability of the developed and validated scale of alienation, it was administered on 500 secondary school teachers. The objective was to conduct comparative analysis of alienation and its dimensions with respect to gender. The findings revealed no significant difference with respect to gender in alienation, social isolation and cultural estrangement. Significant differences were found in case of work alienation wherein the female secondary school teachers were on the higher end in comparison to the male secondary school teachers.