A Study on Development and Validation of Measure to Para-social Interaction for Adolescent

The purpose of this study is to identify the concept and components of expanding para-social interactions and to develop and validate youth scales. To this end, FGIs were conducted on 12 middle and high school students, and data from 366 people in the preliminary question development stage and 360 people in the validation stage were analyzed after expert evaluations. The results are as follows. First, as a result of the preliminary question development stage analysis, five factors and 73 items were derived as components of the para-social interaction scale. Second, based on exploratory factor analysis and on results from expert evaluations, four sub-factors(reciprocity, involvement, identification, and influence) and 32 items were finally selected. As a result of this survey analysis, the reliability of the final PSI-A scale was found to be .93, with involvement .92, reciprocity .91, and influence .90. As a result of confirmatory factor analysis, TLI, CFI, and RESEA outcomes were .904, .911, and .058, respectively, confirming that these factors are suitable models with a four-factor structure. As a result of convergence and discrimination validity analysis, convergence validity was secured by showing a high positive correlations with the PSI-A scale, PSI-process, and EPSI scale developed in this study. Although there was a moderate positive correlation between the PSI-A scale developed in this study and Rubin’s PSI scale, it showed relatively low positive correlations in ‘reciprocity’ and ‘identification’, securing discrimination validity. Taken as a whole, through this study, the possibility of identifying discrimination between scales was secured by discovering differences in para-social relationships that can develop without mutual benefit and para-social interactions caused by mutual senses and experiences.