Development and validation of openness to violation of ethical decisions scale

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate the Openness to Violation of Ethical Decision (OVED) scale, which measures teachers’ openness to violation of their own ethical decision under the influence of key constituencies at the school including students, managers, colleagues and parents. In the development process, reviewing the related literature, gathering expert opinions, conducting interviews with teachers were respectively followed in the respective order. The resulting two level (high and low moral intensity conditions) scale form was subjected to a pilot study with 176 teachers. Two separate exploratory factor analyses (EFA) on low and high moral intensity dimensions of the scale suggested a robust four factor solutions explaining more than70 percent of the variance on both parts. In order to verify the four factor solution, a second study with 508 teachers was conducted. Because of violating the normality assumption, Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was conducted. At first, the reliability of the scale was checked by Cronbach’s alpha and Composite Reliability values. Cronbach’s alpha values were higher than .88 and Composite Reliability values were all higher than .90 for each of the four factors, indicating high reliability. Finally, the results of PLS-SEM values on convergent and discriminant validity revealed high levels of convergent validity and discriminant validity scores for both parts of the scale, which affirmed the validity of the scale.