ICCS 2009 Technical Report - IEA

In Question 4, students were asked to rate their level of agreement (“strongly agree,” “agree,”“disagree,” “strongly disagree”) with statements about corruption in the civic service and thegovernment. The first six items, which related to the acceptability of corrupt practices, wereused to derive the scale students’ attitudes toward corrupt practices in government (ATTCORR).The higher scores on this scale denote a greater degree of acceptance of corrupt practices. Thescale reliability was 0.82 for the pooled ICCS sample, and the reliabilities across countriesranged from 0.77 to 0.84 (see Table 12.54). Table 12.55 shows the item parameters used forscaling.Question 5 asked students to state the extent to which they agreed (“strongly agree,” “agree,”“disagree,” “strongly disagree”) with statements reflecting the idea that the law can, at times, bedisobeyed. Eleven of the 12 items were used to derive the scale students’ attitudes toward disobeyingthe law (DISLAW). The scale reliability was 0.83 for the pooled ICCS sample, and the nationalreliabilities ranged from 0.80 to 0.85 (see Table 12.54). Table 12.55 shows the item wording aswell as the item parameters that were used for scaling. Higher values on this scale reflect greateragreement with the notion that it is acceptable to disobey a law under certain circumstances.Figure 12.29 illustrates the results of the confirmatory factor analysis of these items. TheRMSEA for the three-factor solution indicated a close model fit, but the NNFI and CFIsuggested some lack of fit. Factor loadings generally tended to be quite large. This was not thecase with Item LS2P05J (“disobeying the law is acceptable when one is not familiar with it”),which did not measure DISLAW as well as the other items did; only 25 percent of the item’svariance was explained by the latent factor. The estimated (positive) correlations between thethree latent factors were very high, ranging from 0.81 to 0.91.Students’ perceptions regarding peaceful coexistenceFour scales were derived from questions regarding students’ perceptions related to peacefulcoexistence. Their reliabilities are reported in Table 12.48. The following scales are included inthe Latin American ICCS student database:• Students’ attitudes toward neighborhood diversity (ATTDIFF);• Students’ attitudes toward the use of violence (ATTVIOL);• Students’ feelings of empathy toward classmates (EMPATH);• Students’ personal experience of physical and verbal abuse at school (EXPAGG).Question 6 asked students how they would react (“I would like it,” “I wouldn’t care,” “I woulddislike it”) to having neighbors from diverse populations—racial, national, and religious—aswell as neighbors who had made particular lifestyle choices or had disabilities or medicalconditions. The 10 items associated with the question were used to construct the scale students’attitudes toward neighborhood diversity (ATTDIFF), the higher scores on which correspond toincreased acceptance of diversity. The scale reliability was 0.82 for the Latin American sample,and the reliabilities across the participating countries ranged from 0.78 to 0.84 (see Table12.56). The item parameters that were used for scaling appear in Table 12.57.Question 8 of the student questionnaire asked students to rate their level of agreement (rangingfrom “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”) with four statements relating to the use of violence.The question’s four items were used to derive the scale students’ attitudes toward the use of violence(ATTVIOL); the higher scale scores indicate more positive attitudes toward the use of violence.The scale reliability was 0.76 for the Latin American sample. Reliabilities across the sixparticipating countries ranged from 0.71 to 0.79 (see Table 12.56). Table 12.57 shows the itemparameters that were used for scaling.244ICCS 2009 technical report