Development and validation of Crisis Information Behavior Scale

the purpose of this study is to construct and validate a crisis information behavior questionnaire in Iranian society with an emphasis on public crises.

This research is of mixed type (qualitative and quantitative) which has been designed with the tool making approach. The present study population was citizens of Ahvaz. Four hundred ten people participated in this study. Questionnaire construction methods such as apparent validity, content, and confirmatory factor analysis used to assess the validity of the structure. Cronbach's alpha also used to examine the internal consistency of the factors.

Impact score index for the apparent validity of all items contained an acceptable value of more than 1.5 and for the content validity index the optimal value scale was 0.92. In factor loading, all factors were confirmed with a good explanation in factor analysis and Cronbach's alpha for all factors was acceptable values of 0.7 to 0.9.

The results indicate that there are four main factors of crisis information behavior. The scale designed to study the information behavior of the Iranian community in times of health crisis considered appropriate and recommends its use to measure information behavior during health crises.