content validity and test-retest reliability of a questionnaire to measure virtual social network addiction among students

Background: addiction to virtual social networks (vsns), especially among students, has become a crisis during the recent years. objectives: this study aimed to assess the validity and reliability of a questionnaire on vsn addiction among iranian university students. patients and methods: the initial questionnaire was designed based on extensive literature review and consulting with experts. to measure the item and content validity indexes (i-cvi and s-cvi) and to measure the content validity ratio (cvr), a panel of 24 experts reviewed the questionnaire. to measure the test-retest reliability, the questionnaire was administered on 30 students within the interval of 14 - 21 days and the intra-class correlation coefficient (icc) was calculated. cronbach’s alpha and the corrected item-total correlation were calculated to measure internal consistency. all analysis was done using spss 20 software. results: all items had satisfactory cvr and i-cvi. the s-cvi was 0.98. the value of cronbach’s alpha was 0.88. the corrected item-total correlation for all items, except one, was in acceptable range. this item was removed from the final questionnaire. the test-retest reliability of the questionnaire was almost perfect (icc = 0.9). conclusions: the current study provides a valid and reliable questionnaire to measure vsn addiction among university students. the designed instrument could be used in addiction evaluation studies.