by Pui-Yee Chonga*, Siew-Yean Thamb, Jia-Yi Andrew Kamb

aUniversiti Tenaga Nasional, Malaysia; bUniversiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia

Full Text:  Abstract :  Survey questionnaire is the most common instrument used in social science research. Whether the approach is “adapt & adopt” from currently available instrument or if it is newly developed, researchers would need to test the validity and reliability of the instrument. There are advantages in the “adapt & adopt” approach, however developing one own survey questionnaire has its benefit, it helps to ensure the currency or up-to-date construct and applicability to the context of the study, for example in a particular country or location of study. Hence, this paper aims to share the process of the development of survey instrument to measure international students’ satisfaction. The development of the survey instrument involved four stages; (1) Conceptualization, (2) Development, (3) Validity and (4) Reliability. The first stage which is the conceptualization stage involved the review of literatures and interviews with 20 international students. The results from the review of literatures and interviews serve as the input for the second stage, which is the writing of the items in the questionnaire. Researchers organized and wrote the questions based on constructs found from literature reviews and interviews in the form of items. Upon completion of the survey questionnaire, proof reading and pre-test were conducted to validate the survey questionnaire. Subsequently, in stage four, a pilot study was executed at a private university located in Klang Valley. Data from pilot test were used to test the reliability of the instrument using the Cronbach’s Alpha test on each construct. After the removal and re-grouping of constructs, the final questionnaire has 48 constructs and 186 items. Finally, the second pre-test of the instrument was conducted at two private universities, before the instrument was ready for data collection. It is hope that the sharing of this process will help and provide novice researchers some guidelines in the development of a survey instrument.

Keywords: International students, measuring satisfaction, survey instrument, piloting

Updated:: 22/02/2022 [syazmer]