ICCS 2009 Technical Report - IEA

Students’ perceptions of public serviceThree scales, the reliabilities of which are reported in Table 12.64, were derived from questionsregarding students’ perceptions of public service. The scales, all of which are included in theAsian ICCS student database, were named as follows:• Students’ attitudes toward personal morality of politicians (MORALPOL);• Students’ attitudes toward corruption in public service (CORRPUB);• Students’ attitudes toward the use of connections to hold public office (guanxi).Table 12.64: Reliabilities for scales reflecting students’ perceptions of public service in AsiaCountry Morality Politicians Corruption Pub. Service GuanxiChinese Taipei 0.72 0.71 0.87Hong Kong SAR 0.71 0.72 0.86Indonesia 0.62 0.58 0.75Korea, Republic of 0.74 0.63 0.83Thailand 0.64 0.59 0.78ICCS average 0.68 0.72 0.85Question 5 of the Asian regional instrument contained statements about public officials andpoliticians for which students indicated their level of agreement (“strongly agree,” “agree,”“disagree,” or “strongly disagree”). Two scales were derived from the items within this question.The scale students’ attitudes toward personal morality of politicians (MORALPOL) was constructedfrom five items that addressed morality and principles displayed by politicians along with theresponsibility that these people have to ensure that their families behave morally. The scalereliability (Cronbach’s alpha) of MORALPOL was 0.68 for the pooled ICCS sample, and thenational reliabilities ranged from 0.62 to 0.74 (see Table 12.64). Table 12.65 shows the itemwording as well as the item parameters that were used for scaling. The higher values on thisscale reflect stronger agreement with statements about the importance of politicians behavingmorally.The three remaining items in Question 5 were used to derive the scale students’ attitudestoward corruption in public service (CORRPUB). These items featured statements regarding theacceptability of corruption in public office (guanxi in the Chinese context). The scale reliability(Cronbach’s alpha) was 0.72 for the pooled ICCS sample, and reliabilities ranged from 0.58 to0.72 across the five national samples (see Table 12.64). The item parameters that were used forscaling are shown in Table 12.65.The final question in the Asian regional instrument (Question 8) asked students to rate theirlevel of agreement (“strongly agree,” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree”) with statementsabout the role of connections in elections or public office. The five items associated with thequestion were used to derive the scale students’ attitudes toward the use of connections to hold publicoffice (GUANXI), which had a scale reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) of 0.85 for the Asian sampleand reliabilities ranging from 0.75 to 0.87 across the national samples (see Table 12.64). Table12.65 shows the item wording as well as the item parameters that were used for scaling. Thehigher values on this scale reflect positive attitudes toward using connections in order to securepublic office.256ICCS 2009 technical report