Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Jan 19, 2021
Date Accepted: May 3, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: May 22, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Preliminary development of the social media disinformation scale (SMDS-12) and its association with social media addiction and mental health: COVID-19 as a pilot case study
ABSTRACT
Background:
In recent years, online disinformation has increased. An infodemic has spread around the COVID-19 pandemic. Since January 2020, the culprits and antidotes to disinformation have been digital and social media.
Objective:
Our study aimed to develop and test the psychometric properties of the SMDS-12 measurement scale which assesses the consumption, confidence, and sharing of information related to covid-19 by social media users.
Methods:
A total of 874 subjects recruited over two exploratory (n = 179, Mean age = 29.34, SD = 7.98) and confirmatory (n = 695, Mean age = 31.22, SD = 11.63) periods, completed thesocial media disinformation scale (SMDS-12),the Internet addiction test (IAT), the COVID-19 fear scale, and the perceived stress questionnaire.The 12-item scale (SMDS-12 ) was initially tested by exploratory factor analysis.
Results:
The test supported the three-dimensional structure, in addition, no items were removed from the measurement scale. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the robustness of the measure by referring to a wide range of goodness-of-fit indices that met the recommended standards. The reliability of the instrument examined by means of three internal consistency indices demonstrated that the three dimensions of the instrument are reliable.The correlation between the instrument's dimensions with the internet addiction scale and mental health factors showed positive associations.
Conclusions:
The scale is eligible for measuring the credibility of disinformation and can be adapted to measure the credibility of social media disinformation in other contexts.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.