Political Intelligence Against Misinformation: Validating an Assessment Framework for Digital Democracy in Indonesia
Keywords:
psychometric validation, political intelligence assessment, misinformation resistance, digital democracy, civic competency measurementAbstract
Digital democracies face acute vulnerabilities to misinformation and disinformation, yet assessments of citizen capacity to resist political falsehoods remain fragmented across isolated disciplinary frameworks. This study addresses this gap by developing and validating the Political Intelligence Assessment Framework (PIAF), a multidimensional instrument measuring citizens' integrated competency to acquire, verify, reason about, and ethically evaluate political information in digitally mediated environments. The four-dimensional construct encompasses Political Knowledge, Information Verification, Critical Political Reasoning, and Democratic Ethical Judgment. A sequential validation design was employed with 500 university students (ages 18–24) recruited through stratified random sampling from public and private universities in Bekasi City and Bekasi Regency, West Java, Indonesia, between January and April 2026. Content validity was established through expert panel review (Aiken's V ≥ 0.80 across all dimensions). Rasch measurement analysis via Winsteps confirmed item fit (MNSQ 0.50–1.50), person reliability (0.82), and item reliability (0.94), with no items eliminated. Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated adequate model fit (CFI = 0.96, TLI = 0.95, RMSEA = 0.047), with standardized factor loadings ranging from 0.76 to 0.88. Convergent validity was supported (all CR ≥ 0.86, all AVE ≥ 0.55), and discriminant validity confirmed via Fornell–Larcker criterion and HTMT ratios below 0.85. Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranged from 0.84 to 0.88. PIAF demonstrates robust psychometric properties suitable for large-scale deployment in civic education assessment, curriculum evaluation, and research on digital citizenship competency development. The framework contributes both theoretically by formalizing political intelligence as a distinct higher-order construct and methodologically, through integration of content validity, Rasch analysis, and CFA validation. Implications extend to educational policy, anti-misinformation interventions, and democratic governance in Southeast Asia.
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