Reliability, Validity and Measurement Invariance of the Chinese College Students’ Internet Trolling Scale

Objective: To revise the Chinese version of the Internet Spray Behavior Scale and test its reliability, validity, and measurement equivalence. Method: A total of 1200 college students were tested using the General Behavior Inventory Revised (GAIT-R) for online trolling. The simple sadomasochistic impulsivity scale, cyberbullying scale, and cyberaggressive behavior scale were used as benchmarks, and 315 college students were retested after a 4-week interval. Result: The revised scale not only has a good single factor structure, but also has measurement equivalence across gender, age, grade, and major. Conclusion: The revised GAIT-R can serve as a scientific tool for measuring the online trolling behavior of Chinese university students. In addition, a common method bias test was conducted on the sample data using the single factor CFA method and controlling for unmeasured latent method factors.