Measuring Message Credibility: Construction and Validation of an Exclusive Scale

Despite calls to conceptualize credibility as three separate conceptssource credibility, message credibility, and media credibilitythere exists no scale that exclusively measures message credibility. To address this gap, the current study constructs and validates a new scale. Results from a confirmatory factor analysis suggest that message credibility, specifically in the context of news, can be measured by asking participants to rate how well three adjectives describe content: accurate, authentic, and believable. Validity and reliability tests are reported, and contributions to credibility research are discussed.