Standardizing of the Rumors Acceptance Questionnaire among Social Networks Audiences

Purpose: Today, the use of social networks has grown a lot and therefore the present study was conducted with the aim of standardizing the rumors acceptance questionnaire among the social networks audiences. Methodology: The present study in terms of purpose was applied and in terms of implementation method was descriptive from type of correlation. The study population was Iranian active audiences in the social networks of Telegram and Instagram in 2019-2000 years. The sample size was estimated to be 368 people who were selected by available sampling method considering with the rate of users of Telegram and Instagram social networks. Data were collected with using a rumors acceptance questionnaire (Kim & Bock, 2011) and analyzed by confirmatory factor analysis and one sample t test in SPSS software. Findings: Findings showed that the rumors acceptance questionnaire had 48 items and five factors of rumor transmission, reasoning, negative emotions, source validity and belief formation that the factor load of all items and their factors were higher than 0.40. In addition to confirming the validity of the instrument structure by factor analysis method, the content validity of the instrument was confirmed by the opinion experts and the reliability was calculated by Cronbach's alpha for the mentioned five factors 0.91, 0.87, 0.83, 0.88 and 0.92, respectively, and for the total instrument to be 0.95. Other findings showed that the average of rumors acceptance and its factors except rumor transmission that was lower than medium, was higher than medium (P<0.05). Conclusion: The rumors acceptance questionnaire had good validity and reliability among social networks audiences. Therefore, this tool can be used by other researchers to investigate the rate of rumors acceptance.