engleski

Development of Attitude Towards Plagiarism Questionnaire

Aim To construct and test the factorial structure and psychometric characteristics of a questionnaire measuring attitude towards plagiarism. Methods For the first versions of the questionnaire 67 statements were developed based on the relevant literature, after expert revisions the number of statements decreases to 36. For the validation process a research was conducted from March to June 2009. Participants were 227 undergraduates and graduate students (128 women and 99 men) from three Croatian universities, with a median age 21 years (range 18 to 48). Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to find out the factor structure of the questionnaire and to measure construct validity. The number of factors to retain was determined by the Scree-test and interpretability criteria. Results A three-factor structure was disclosed addressing different aspects of attitudes towards plagiarism: factor I - approving attitude towards plagiarism (12 items) ; factor II - disapproving attitude towards plagiarism (7 items) ; and factor III - subjective norms towards plagiarism (10 items). The final version of the questionnaire consisted of 29 items. Cronbach's alpha was calculated to confirm the reliability of the scale: factor I, a = 0.83 ; factor II, a = 0.79 ; and factor III, a = 0.85. Correlations among factors were: –0.37 between I and II, –0.41 between I and III and +0.31 between II and III. Conclusion Attitudes Towards Plagiarism (ATP) questionnaire has been developed with good psychometric requirements. The Croatian version of the ATPQ has been retested in 2013, confirming the obtained factor structure. The English version was used in different researches measuring attitudes towards plagiarism in USA, SAR, Thailand, Pakistan, Malaysia, Latvia, Philippines, Indonesia...etc. It will be still used in future research as a standardized tool for measuring attitudes towards plagiarism.

attitude ; factor analysis ; statistical ; plagiarism ; validation study ; questionnaire

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