VALIDATION OF THE MALEVOLENT CREATIVITY BEHAVIOR SCALE IN THE ARAB CONTEXT USING CONFIRMATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS WITH A SAMPLE COMPRISING UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN SAUDI ARABIA AND SUDAN

This study aimed to verify Malevolent Creativity Behavior Scale (MCBS) in the Arab context, using descriptive correlational design. The study sample, which was drawn from the population of university students in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and in the republic of Sudan, comprised 3,408 male and female undergraduate university students (n=1,789 Saudi; n=1,619 Sudanese). The MCBS scale comprises 13 items in three dimensions (i.e., hurting people, lying, and playing tricks), which fall under the general category of malevolent creativity. In this study, the sole alteration made was to translate the scale into Arabic. This research, which employed confirmatory factor analysis, confirmed the MCBS as a valid tool for measuring malevolent creativity in the Arab environment. While this supports the use of the scale with the population of university students in the two countries, there is a need to confirm our findings through application to additional and diverse populations in Sudan and Saudi Arabia as well as to populations in other Arab world countries. Findings restricted to the Sudanese sample of this study solely on the topic of gender and rates of malevolent creativity were previously presented.