Judgement and Revised

Upon the completion of Step Five, the questionnaire was examined for content validity. According to Cavana et al. (2001:238), assessing content validity can be

68

done by a group of experts who examine each item and make a judgement on whether each item does measure the theoretical construct nominated. For this purpose, the questionnaire was sent to two academics in the area: one from Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia and the other, from the National University of Malaysia. The first, an Associate Professor specialised in Human Resource Management while the second specialised in Organisational Behaviour. The researcher considered their specialisations as closely related to the field of Human Resource Development and therefore, they were suitable to be the panel judges. They were invited to give their comments not only about the validity of the items but also the general appearance of the questionnaire as well. The comments made by the two panel judges and the type of action taken were shown in Table 3.3 below.

Table 3.3 Experts Comments

Comment Action Taken

Expert 1 and 2:

The respondent’s name, email and contact number should not be included in the demographic information, as these will cause bias.

The researcher gained confirmation by the course co-ordinator at the training centre that this information could be obtained from the registration database. Therefore, action was taken to delete them from the questionnaire.

Expert 1:

There were two items in the questionnaire that could not be answered by respondents at the conclusion of a training program.

These two items were made in future tense.

Expert 1 and 2:

The length of the questionnaire (117 items). The researcher maintained the length of the questionnaire until the questionnaire was piloted in order to gain the feedback from the respondents.

Step 7-Pilot Study

According to Churchill (1979:206), data collection should never begin without an adequate pre-test of the instrument. For this reason, the questionnaire was pilot tested with 28 trainees attending a two-day workshop on Public Accounts at the training division, Accountant General’s Department of Malaysia. In the pilot test, two main factors suggested by Spector (1992:8) were examined: respondent identification of ambiguous and confusing items; and items which could not be rated using the

69

dimension chosen. Other than that, the researcher also examined the time taken by the respondents to complete all the 177 items.

The department granted the permission to conduct the pilot test (see Appendix C) and respondents were informed that the study was voluntary and anyone who wished to leave was allowed to do so. All agreed to participate. The questionnaire was administered at the conclusion of the training program and collected immediately upon completion. During the pilot test, as indicated above, the respondents were concerned about the length of the questionnaire (117 items). They had been told that all items were in short sentences and should not take a long time to complete. They were also given the chance to ask any questions for clarity if they found this necessary. All the respondents said that the questionnaire was understandable and they took between 30 to 40 minutes to complete the questionnaire. The data obtained from the pilot study was then used to examine the internal consistency of the items for each construct. This is described in the next step.

Step 8-Item Analysis

In this step, item analysis was conducted to find those items that formed an internally consistent scale and to eliminate those items that did not (Spector 1992:29). For this reason, the researcher adopted several recommendations made by experts while conducting this step as follows:

• The item-to-total correlations exceed 0.50 and the inter-item correlations exceed 0.30 (Hair et al. 1998:118).

• Reliability coefficient alpha for a new scale should be at least 0.70 (Nunnally 1978:245) or it may decrease to 0.60 in an exploratory research (Hair et al. 1998:118).

• Item means close to the centre of the range of possible scores is desirable (De Vellis 2003:94).

70

The result of the item analysis is presented in Table 3.4.

Table 3.4 Results of the Item Analysis

Construct Total Items Number of Items Dropped Number of Items Retained Cronbach’s Alpha Learner readiness 7 2 5 0.66 Performance-self efficacy 7 3 4 0.86 Motivation to transfer 6 2 4 0.78 Transfer effort- performance expectations 6 1 5 0.68 Performance- outcome expectations 5 1 4 0.83 Feedback 5 1 4 0.68 Peer Support 5 1 4 0.86 Supervisor Support 5 1 4 0.69 Openness to Change 6 2 4 0.85 Personal Outcomes-Positive 6 2 4 0.78 Personal Outcomes-Negative 5 1 4 0.76 Supervisor Sanctions 5 1 4 0.90 Personal capacity for Transfer 5 2 3 0.61 Opportunity to Use 5 1 4 0.80 Content Validity 7 2 5 0.75 Transfer Design 6 2 4 0.92 Sharing Behaviour 6 1 5 0.85 Intention to Share 5 1 4 0.84 Attitude toward Knowledge Sharing 5 0 5 0.63 Subjective Norm toward Knowledge Sharing 5 1 4 0.85 Perceived Behavioural Control toward Knowledge Sharing 5 2 3 0.86 Total 117 30 87

71

As expected, several items had to be dropped due to low reliability. Nevertheless, all scales had an adequate number of items (at least three items) to achieve content adequacy (Cook et al. 1989). Two scales (personal capacity for transfer and

perceived behavioural control toward knowledge sharing) had three items respectively while in other scales, items ranged from four to five items per scale. Although the Cronbach’s Alpha reliability was based on a small sample of respondents (n = 28), it still served as an indicator that the scales were consistent in measuring the intended constructs.

Finally, 87 items were retained and used in the final questionnaire for data collection. The researcher maintained the wordings of all the retained items as the feedback received from the respondents during the pilot study indicated that they were understandable.