Psychometric Properties of the Cost Scale: A Component of Expected Value Theory

The purpose of this study is to investigate the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the cost scale. This applied study adopted a psychometric design and its statistical population consisted of 10th and 11th grade female students in Kashan during the 2016–2017 school year. Among the female students in public schools, 404 were selected through a multistage cluster sampling method and answered the cost scale. Validity and reliability, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were evaluated using SPSS and LISREL software. The results of exploratory factor analysis by principal components method confirmed the three factors of task emotional and effort cost, outside effort cost and loss of estimated alternatives for cost scale. To investigate the reliability of the questionnaire, Cronbach’s alpha was used and factor analysis was employed to determine validity. In addition, results indicated that the questionnaire had acceptable internal consistency and the Cronbach’s alpha coefficients in the subscales are above 0.9. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis confirmed that the structure of the questionnaire had an acceptable fit with the data and all the indicators of goodness of fit confirmed the model. The results of the factor analysis were almost identical to those of the original culture and the reliability and validity coefficients were close to their results. Therefore, considering the desirable psychometric properties, this questionnaire is a suitable instrument for determining students’ perceived costs.