The Turkish Short Form of the Digital Maturity Level Scale: A Validity and Reliability Study among Development Agency Managers

Abstract

Purpose – The Industrial Revolutions, which began in Britain in the eighteenth century, opened a new era in digital transformation with the emergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Germany in 2011. The transformation process that has taken place compels organizations to change in the areas of human resources, technological infrastructure, production processes, and organizational culture. In order to measure the level of organizations' adaptation to digital transformation, the digital maturity level is used as an indicator. Although many scales have been developed or adapted in the literature to measure organizations' digital maturity levels, there are a limited number of studies that measure digital maturity specifically in public institutions. This study aims to develop a Turkish short form of the Digital Maturity Level Scale developed by Cramner (2021) for public institutions and to examine its psychometric properties. Method – As part of the adaptation study conducted to develop the Turkish short form, permission was first obtained from Cramner, the developer of the original scale. Since the original scale was developed in English, the back-translation method was employed during its adaptation into Turkish. The scale was translated from English into Turkish by a subject matter expert and a language expert, and was subsequently translated back into English by another subject matter expert and a language expert to assess linguistic equivalence. To verify the accuracy of the back-translation process, the original English version and the back-translated English version were applied to 10 individuals, and item equivalence was examined. Subsequently, the questionnaire items were evaluated in terms of content validity using the Davis Technique, and seven items that did not meet the required threshold were excluded from the study. Following the linguistic validity stage, data were collected from 142 managers working in Development Agencies to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Turkish short form. The collected data were analyzed using the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) Test, Bartlett's Test of Sphericity, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), Cronbach's alpha reliability analysis, and convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity analyses.

Findings – The Turkish short form developed through expert evaluations and psychometric analyses was found to exhibit a two-factor structure based on data collected from 142 managers working in Development Agencies. Exploratory Factor Analysis indicated a Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) value of 0.91, and the scale explained 62.07% of the total variance. Confirmatory Factor Analysis demonstrated that the model showed an acceptable fit to the data (χ²/df = 2.48; CFI = 0.95; TLI = 0.94; RMSEA = 0.089; SRMR = 0.034). Convergent validity analysis yielded a Composite Reliability (CR) value of 0.90 and an Average Variance Extracted (AVE) value of 0.642 for the Advanced Digital Technology Competence dimension, and a CR value of 0.91 and an AVE value of 0.74 for the Digital Strategy and Transformation Capacity dimension. The findings provide preliminary support for the two-factor structure of the Turkish short form, consisting of 12 items with six items in each dimension, within this sample.

Discussion – The study is considered to serve as an important reference for assessing the digitalization process of Development Agencies and public institutions with similar organizational characteristics, as well as identifying areas requiring improvement.