The development of the Turkish form of the Spielberger test anxiety inventory: |a study of transliteral equivalence and reliability

Abstract

This thesis is based on a study about the Turkish adaptation of the Test Anxiety Inventory (TAl), developed by Spielberger in 1980. It was carried in two phases. First, the transliteral equivalence of the inventory was established; then, the reliability of the Turkish form of the inventory was studied. In the transliteral equivalence part of the study, the English and the Turkish forms of the inventory were tested on 164 Turkish bilingual university and highschool students. The analyses including analysis of variance. Product Moment, alpha, item-total, and item-remainder correlation techniques showed that there were no significant differences between the scores obtained from the English and the Turkish language forms of the TAl. This finding indicated that the English and the Turkish forms of the TAl are comparable psycho linguistically. In the reliability part of the study the stability and the internal consistency of the Turkish form of the TAl (TAI-T) were investigated. For this purpose, 1031 Turkish students from different levels of education (university, senior, and junior highschool) and SES in istanbul were tested. The stability of the scores of the TAI-T was found by test-retest correlations with varying time intervals. The obtained high test-retest correlations attested to the stability of the scale. The internal consistency of the TAI-T was established us~ng alpha, item-total, and item-remainder correlations. High alpha coefficients, and mediocre to high item-total and item-remainder correlations were obtained. These values indicate that the item consistency and the homogeneity of the Turkish form are very satisfactory in general. One particular finding, however, was that with younger (junior highschool) students some test items need further improvement for better internal consistency. It is recommended that this point is taken up in the following studies. Generally, the study demonstrated supporting data on the stability and the internal consistency of the TAI-T.