Construction and Piloting of Attitude Towards Research Participation Scale for University Students

INTRODUCTION: Attitude toward participation in the research plays an important role in the quality of any research. Therefore, researchers aimed at construction and piloting of scale to measure attitude toward research participation for university students. METHOD AND RESULTS: In Study I, an initial pool of items was generated on the basis of literature review, semi-structured interviews and expert opinions. After ensuring content validity and finalizing items with the help of experts, the scale was applied on a sample of 426 university students including both men (n = 114) and women (n = 312) with age range of 17–30. Exploratory factor analysis revealed the two factor structure was with 60.33% cumulative variance. The factors revealed were positive attitude and negative attitude toward research with alpha reliability of 0.84 for positive attitude while 0.76 for negative attitude. In Study II, confirmatory factor analysis revealed excellent model fit indices with two factor structure. Study III was meant to provide evidence of construct validity. Positive correlation showed exploration and curiosity with positive attitude toward research and negative correlation of exploration and curiosity with negative attitude toward research participation provided strong evidence for convergent validity. While non-significant correlation of attitude toward research with religiosity confirmed the divergent validity of the scale. CONCLUSION: Findings of the study revealed that Attitude Toward Research Participation Scale is a valid and reliable measure. It can be used for university students to measure their attitude toward research.