A Valid and Reliable Safety Scale for Passenger’s Perceptions of Airport Safety

Previous research has developed various customer satisfaction scales in many applied areas; however, to our knowledge, there is not a validated scale for measuring commercial airline passengers’ ratings of personal safety based on airport security. The current study seeks to address this missing gap by developing a valid and reliable safety scale for commercial airline passengers (SS-CAP). We first solicited words and phrases that are related to a passenger’s feeling of safety from potential consumers and experts in the field. We then narrowed down the list to 7 remaining items. Lastly, we tested the scale using participants from Amazon's ® Mechanical Turk ®, which is reliable source for participants in online surveys. A principle components factor analysis with varimax rotation revealed that all items loaded strongly on one factor, accounting for 78% of the variance in the model. A Cronbach's alpha test revealed high internal consistency, r = 0.95. A Guttman split half test showed high reliability, r = 0.95. These results provide strong evidence for a valid and reliable scale of passenger ratings of personal safety. The scale statements include: I feel safe, I feel secure, I feel protected, I feel guarded from danger, I feel shielded from harm, I feel at ease, I feel sheltered from threats. Participants should respond on a 5-point Likert type scale scored from strongly disagree (-2) to strongly agree (+2).