The public role of professionals: Developing and evaluating the civic-minded professional scale

Abstract

This research provided understanding of the concept civic-minded professional. A civic-minded professional is one who is(a)skillfully trained through formal education, with (b) the ethical disposition as a social trustee of knowledge, and (c) the capacity to work with others in a democratic way, (d) to achieve public goods. Forty-four items were developed for the Civic-Minded Professional scale based on a multi-disciplinary literature review. The scale was part of an online survey distributed to a national sample of faculty in higher education (n=373)to evaluate the reliability (alpha = .95) and validity of the scale. Exploratory factor analysis reduced the scale to thirty-two item and five factors (i.e., voluntary action, citizenship, social trustee, identity and calling, consensus building).