DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF A DIGITAL VULNERABILITY IDENTIFICATION INSTRUMENT (DVI-Q) FOR K-12 STUDENTS ¹

ABSTRACT:

The number of young people using digital technologies at an earlier age has increased significantly. Considering that the inappropriate and abusive use of technologies can harm several dimensions of human life, this article presents and discusses the systematization of the development stages and the validation of an instrument that aims to measure digital vulnerability indicators among high schoolers. Based on the literature, the construction of the Digital Vulnerability Identification Questionnaire (DVI-Q) chooses, through the Delphi method, the type of content validation to evaluate the specialists' judgment about the contents in the instrument. A panel of 26 experts with training and experience in the education and health fields participated in this validation process. Further, samples of students participated, contributing to the semantic analysis of the questions and pilot application of the questionnaire to analyze and test the statistics. All these steps occurred during the pandemic period. The DVI-Q reached excellent results in the validation processes, with a Content Validity Index above 0.80 in all questions and categories. Its reliability and consistency was proven through Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.821. The final version of the DVI-Q contains 24 questions divided into four categories. During the validation process, evidence showed that this instrument could also be applied to different audiences to investigate different correlations, other research instruments, and statistical analyzes, after some improvements and cross-cultural adaptations.

Keywords:
Digital mobile technologies; content validation; Delphi method