Abstract:

Background
Leadership has become an increasingly important outcome for higher education. There are calls for leadership development in university graduates to meet the challenges due to the changing nature of problems in today’s society. The social change model of leadership development is one of the most well-known student leadership models. The model includes eight core values of Consciousness of Self, Congruence, Commitment, Courage, Collaboration, Common Purpose, Controversy with Civility, and Citizenship. The eight critical values of the social change model serves as the basis for the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (SRLS). The SRLS measures were reduced from the original version of 103 to the shorter version of 68 items (SRLS-R2) in 1998. Previous studies have shown high reliability of the eight separate scales in the SRLS-R2 in undergraduate samples in the West. Yet, no psychometric study of the scale has been reported for Chinese undergraduate populations so far. Thus, the objective of the study was to examine the factor structure and reliability of the Chinese version of the SRLS-R2 scale.

Methods
This is the baseline cross-sectional survey of a 3-year longitudinal study examining the value gained of undergraduate programs at a research intensive university in Hong Kong. The baseline survey was conducted in 2007 with first year undergraduate students. A stratified random sample of 589 students was selected from all the first year undergraduate students by study discipline. Email invitations were sent to the sampled students. Follow-up emails were sent one week later to boost responses. Students who had completed the questionnaire were remunerated at HK$50 per hour for their time spent in the study. For each of the eight scales in the SRLS-R2, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to assess factor structure by fitting a one-factor model to the covariance matrix of the corresponding items. Goodness of fit was evaluated by robust Comparative Fit Index (R-CFI) > 0.9, Standardized Root Mean Squared Residuals (SRMR) < 0.08, and robust Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (R-RMSEA) < 0.08. Cronbach’s alpha was employed to examine scale reliability.

Results
A total of 416 (70.6%) first year undergraduate students completed the baseline questionnaires. Among them, 267 (64.2%) were males and 294 (70.7%) aged ≤ 19 years old. CFA results revealed that the 1-factor models provided adequate fits to the data of Congruence (R-CFI, SRMR, R-RMSEA) (0.92, 0.06, 0.08), Commitment (1.00, 0.03, 0.00), Collaboration (0.94, 0.05, 0.04), Common Purpose (0.94, 0.05, 0.04), and Citizenship (0.93, 0.05, 0.07), marginally adequate fit to the data of Consciousness of Self (0.87, 0.06, 0.08), but inadequate to Change (0.833, 0.07, 0.09) and Controversy with Civility (0.78, 0.06, 0.05). Cronbach’s alpha values were > 0.7 for Congruence, Consciousness of Self, Common Purpose, and Citizenship; were 0.6 - 0.7 for Collaboration, Commitment, and Change; and < 0.6 for Controversy with Civility.

Conclusion: The scales in the SRLS-R2 instrument had acceptable psychometric properties except Change and Controversy with Civility in the current Hong Kong first year undergraduate sample. Further validation studies to remove inappropriate items are needed for its use with confidence in Chinese undergraduate student populations.

Keywords:

Socially Responsible Leadership Scale, Factor structure.