Construction and validation of an instrument measuring attitudes towards human rights of Liberal Studies teachers in Hong Kong

In 2009, Liberal Studies, which can be used as a platform for human rights education, was newly introduced as a compulsory subject for the senior secondary students in Hong Kong. As teacher’s attitudes impact students’ learning largely, a survey was conducted in 2010 to measure Liberal Studies teachers’ attitudes towards human rights. This article focuses on the development and validation of the questionnaire instrument measuring Liberal Studies teachers’ human rights attitudes, which is one of the pioneers in Asian societies. The dimensions of the instrument were first explored by exploratory factor analysis, and were confirmed to include Social Welfare, Civilian Constraints, Personal Liberties, Equality, Privacy – School Management and Privacy –Others. Then, the six-dimensional instrument was validated by confirmatory factor analysis and Rasch analysis. It is expected that it will serve as a base to build a potential tool for comparative study of human rights attitudes in Asian societies. Copyright © 2015 The Author(s).