A construct validity study of scores on a Korean version of an academic self-concept scale for secondary school students

For each of three samples of 213 8th-grade girls, 191 11th-grade boys, and 213 11th-grade girls attending schools in Korea, the twofold purpose of this investigation was to obtain evidence of the internal-consistency reliability and construct validity of scores on each of the five factor subscales of a Korean version of an academic self-concept instrument titled Dimensions of Self-Concept (DOSC), Form S. internal-consistency estimates of the reliability of scores on the five 14-item factor subscales fell between .63 and .89, with a median value approximating .78. Confirmatory maximum-likelihood factor analyses for five alternative substantive factor models indicated that both a five-factor oblique model and a hierarchical factor model comprising a general factor correlated with interrelated first-order factors explained the greatest percentage of covariance in the two matrices for the two samples of 11th-grade students. The five hypothesized constructs of the DOSC, Form S (Korean version) received at least modest empirical support.