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Voter Apathy: A Psychometric Enabled Measurement
Subject area: Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities · Area of research: Psychology
Abstract
Voter apathy is a concept in political psychology that expresses the passivity or lack of interest of individuals in participating to choose their representative(s). Due to the absence of a psychometric enabled measure of voter apathy in Nigeria, this study developed a scale to measure the construct and assess the individual indisposition to performing their civic obligation. Two thousand three hundred and thirty one (2331) randomly selected respondents across the three senatorial districts of Lagos State with ages ranging from 20-65 years old, a mean age of 25.2 and standard deviation of 9.7 participated in the study. This is a 6-item scale in the Likert format of 5-point response options ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). Result shows that the measure has content validity (using 80% agreements of experts). Reliability test revealed a Cronbach?s coefficient alpha of .76 and the standardized item alpha of .76 and McDonald?s test of .76. Guttman split-half coefficient is .74 with Correlation between forms of .60. Equal-length Spearman-Brown coefficient is .75 while Alpha for parts 1 and 2 were .62 and .68 respectively. The Statistical analysis also revealed significance of the KMO test at .82 and Bartlett?s test (x2(78) = 3018.16, p <.001) while communalities of variable?s variability ranged between .34 and .57. Factor Analysis using principal component analysis (PCA) shows that all the items loaded as one factor with eigenvalue of 2.793 and cumulative percentage variance of 46.55. It was concluded that this scale is relevant in measuring the political tendency of individual in the discharge of their civic responsibility - voting in a democratic setting.
Keywords
Lagos State, psychometric, reliability, validation, voter apathy.
How to cite this paper
@article{1709026,
author = {Ojo Monday, Peter Olapegba, Nyitor Alexander Shenge},
title = {Voter Apathy: A Psychometric Enabled Measurement},
journal = {Iconic Research And Engineering Journals},
year = {2025},
volume = {8},
number = {12},
pages = {267-271},
issn = {2456-8880},
url = {https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1709026.pdf},
abstract = {Voter apathy is a concept in political psychology that expresses the passivity or lack of interest of individuals in participating to choose their representative(s). Due to the absence of a psychometric enabled measure of voter apathy in Nigeria, this study developed a scale to measure the construct and assess the individual indisposition to performing their civic obligation. Two thousand three hundred and thirty one (2331) randomly selected respondents across the three senatorial districts of Lagos State with ages ranging from 20-65 years old, a mean age of 25.2 and standard deviation of 9.7 participated in the study. This is a 6-item scale in the Likert format of 5-point response options ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). Result shows that the measure has content validity (using 80% agreements of experts). Reliability test revealed a Cronbach?s coefficient alpha of .76 and the standardized item alpha of .76 and McDonald?s test of .76. Guttman split-half coefficient is .74 with Correlation between forms of .60. Equal-length Spearman-Brown coefficient is .75 while Alpha for parts 1 and 2 were .62 and .68 respectively. The Statistical analysis also revealed significance of the KMO test at .82 and Bartlett?s test (x2(78) = 3018.16, p <.001) while communalities of variable?s variability ranged between .34 and .57. Factor Analysis using principal component analysis (PCA) shows that all the items loaded as one factor with eigenvalue of 2.793 and cumulative percentage variance of 46.55. It was concluded that this scale is relevant in measuring the political tendency of individual in the discharge of their civic responsibility - voting in a democratic setting.},
keywords = {Lagos State, psychometric, reliability, validation, voter apathy.},
month = {June},
}