Development of the Perception of Safety Scale and investigating of its reliability and validity

Abstract

The perception of being unsafe leads to stress and negative outcomes. Measuring the perception of safety is important for investigating the influences of safety-related issues; however, no scale has been developed that comprehensively measures the perception of safety. The present study aimed to develop the Perception of Safety Scale and investigate its reliability and validity. I developed items based on free descriptions in a preliminary survey, and selected items based on exploratory factor analyses in Study 1. Consequently, I extracted eight factors. In Study 2, I confirmed the factor structure from Study 1 and tested its test-retest reliability. I confirmed that the bi-factor model is a better fit, and all factors showed sufficient test-retest reliability. In Study 3, I investigated the concurrent and construct validity. Almost all hypothesized correlations were significant and greater than the medium effect size; hence the concurrent and construct validity were confirmed. Although there are limitations to the robustness of the acceptance from others factor, the present study showed that the Perception of Safety Scale has sufficient reliability and validity.