Normalization (Standardization) of Rumors Acceptance Questionnaire among Audience of Social Networking Apps

Today, using social networking apps has developed a lot. For this reason, the present study was conducted to normalize rumors acceptance questionnaire among the audience of social networking apps.

The present study was applied in terms of objective and descriptive correlational in terms of correlation type. The research population consisted of active Iranian audiences in Telegram and Instagram during 2019-2020. The sample size was estimated to be n=368, who were selected using the convenience sampling method, respecting the proportion of users of Telegram and Instagram. The data were collected by rumors acceptance questionnaire (Kim & Bock, 2011) and analyzed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and one-sample t-test using SPSS.

The results showed that the rumor acceptance questionnaire had 48 items and five factors of rumor transmission, reasoning, negative emotions, credibility and believing, and the factor loading of all items and their factors were above 0.40. In addition to confirming the construct validity of the tool by the factor analysis, the content validity of the tool according to the opinion of experts and reliability by Cronbach's alpha for the five factors were 0.91, 0.87, 0.83, 0.88 and 0.92; and 0.95 for the tool, respectively. Other results showed that the average acceptance of rumors and its factors were higher than the average except for rumor transmission, which was lower than the average (P<0.05).

The rumors acceptance questionnaire among the audience of social networking apps had good validity and reliability. Therefore, the above tool can be used by other researchers to check the acceptance of rumors.