Measuring Message Credibility: Construction and Validation of an Exclusive Scale

• In Event: Methodological Innovations in Mass Communication Research

Abstract

Despite calls to conceptualize credibility as three separate concepts--source credibility, message credibility, and media credibility (Metzger et al., 2003)--, there exists no scale that exclusively measures message credibility. To address this gap, the current study constructs and validates a new scale. Results from confirmatory factor analysis suggest that message credibility can be measured by asking participants to rate how well the following adjectives describe content: accurate, believable, and authentic. Interestingly, this measure was not influenced by expertise or fairness, two concepts often associated with general notions of credibility. Instead, it appears that quality is the main determinant of message credibility. Validity and reliability tests are reported and contributions to credibility research are discussed.

Authors

• Alyssa Appelman, The Pennsylvania State University

• S. Shyam Sundar, Pennsylvania State U and Sungkyunkwan Univ