Sigerson, L., & Cheng, C. (2018).

Scales for measuring user engagement with social network

sites: A systematic review of psychometric properties. Computers in Human Behavior,
83, 87-105. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2018.01.023

This publication by Leif Sigerson and Cecilia Cheng reviews current methods of
measuring social media use and evaluates fourteen different scales. Many researchers face the
problem of measuring social network engagement as there are many individual, nuanced
behaviors of users that create difficulty in generating meaningful data about social media use. By
evaluating different scales, this review gives options to researchers who may pick a scale that
works best for their future studies. The main factors used to assess the scales were reliability and
validity (including structural, criterion, convergent, incremental, and discriminant validity). The
authors summarize their findings on thes 14 different scales, describing their conclusions about
each of the factors of reliability and validity for each scale. They then give suggestions for how
to employ each scale and what steps to take when using scales that have possible issues with
certain validity or reliability factors. Overall, the authors conclude that more research and
development is needed in the field of SNS engagement and testing, but that the findings of this
literature review provide a foundation for picking a scale which best fits a researcher’s needs.
This current literature review was written by Leif Sigerson and Cecilia Cheng. Sigerson
is a fellow at Insight Data Science and a PhD candidate at Hong Kong University. He studies and
has many publications related to cyberpsychology research and data collection methods. Cheng
has a PhD in psychology and is a professor of psychology at the University of Hong Kong; she
leads research on personality and social psychology with a focus on technology use. This review
has broad and deep coverage. The authors give a general description of their evaluation of
different scales testing social media use. For example, they write that for the Facebook intensity
scale (FBI), “Reliability, estimated with internal consistency, was acceptable” (Sigerson &
Cheng). The authors then go into more detail, explaining that “many… studies have consistently
shown that the FBI scale is reliable (i.e., Cronbach's α > .70), including instances where it was
adapted for use in diverse contexts such as SNS engagement in general, Snapchat, and cross-
cultural Facebook interaction.” (Sigerson & Cheng). The authors continue this evaluation of each
scale of social media by giving a general summary of the scale’s merits and possible issues and
by then giving detailed analysis of how each source was evaluated. The authors also attempt to
reduce bias and explicitly state measures that they took to do so. They explain that “publication
bias is commonly recognized as a potential threat to the comprehensiveness of systematic
reviews” but that in their literature review, “to reduce this possible bias, [they] did not place any
limits regarding publication status in our database searches, and also endeavored to locate more
unpublished work by browsing through conference proceedings and thesis databases” (Sigerson
& Cheng). The literature review accurate. However, the authors disclose that this field of
research is still expanding and that , “given that SNS is an emerging but rapidly growing area of
study, SNS engagement scales have mushroomed in the past decade but not many of them have
undergone thorough psychometric evaluations” (Sigerson & Cheng). Therefore, many of the
findings and conclusions of this study cannot be corroborated by other sources due to the lack of
research done in this growing field. However, the methods with which the researchers evaluated
different SNS engagement scales can be corroborated by similar literature reviews. For example,
according to a publication by Dr. Tenko Rankov, a professor of quantitative methods at the
University of Michigan, criterion validity is how much the test predicts the outcome and “can be
quantified in the correlation coefficient between the sum score.” In this literature review about
SNS scales, criterion validity was measured by examining the relationship between the SNS
scales’ results and the actual characteristic for which they test. For other measures of validity and
reliability, the authors also use proper methodology to evaluate each scale, thus ensuring
accuracy despite the lack of extensive corroborating evidence for all of their conclusions. The
authors explicitly state their purpose, saying that “the overarching aim of the present systematic
review is to identify a list of scales developed for the measurement of SNS engagement and
provide a comprehensive psychometric review of each of them.” This purpose is appropriate for
the scholarly audience as “scholars with an interest in improving measurement in SNS research
can use this guide to identify important areas where more validation effort is needed, whereas
other SNS researchers can use this guide to determine whether a particular scale is reliable and
valid when planning for their future studies” (Sigerson & Cheng).