Analysis of the validity and reliability of a questionnaire to measure students’ perception of inclusion of sustainability in engineering degrees

Abstract

Purpose

There are multiple questionnaires in the literature that try to gather university students’ perception about sustainable development (SD), but they are mainly focused on determining the students’ knowledge and attitude about sustainability. As the existing questionnaires did not fit the type of analysis that is intended to carry out, a new questionnaire was developed, adapted to the aims and context (engineering students) of the pretended study. The questionnaire contains two scales; one to determine the level of insertion of sustainability and the other to measure the importance that students give in their training process to the three dimensions of sustainability: economic, environmental and social. This new instrument requires a validation process to ensure its content – validity, reliability and clarity. The aim of this paper is to describe the validation process.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper shows the validation process of a questionnaire designed ad hoc to measure the students’ perception on SD inclusion level in three current engineering degrees, at the Engineering School of Bilbao (EIB) that belongs to the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). The questionnaire validation process was conducted in three stages: experts on the subject provided their advice to ensure the study objectives, a small number of students contributed to clarify the statement of the questions, and thus, to increase the reliability of the questionnaire and finally, a larger number of students completed the survey to analyse the internal consistency of the two scales in the questionnaire with the Cronbach’s alpha test.

Findings

As a result of the entire validation process, an appropriate scale has been obtained to measure the importance that students give to the three dimensions of sustainability, economic, environmental and social, and to the sustainability overall. Furthermore, an appropriate scale to measure the insertion level of sustainability in engineering studies has been developed. However, the insertion scale needs a revision in the items of social and economic dimension to be valid to conduct disaggregated studies by dimensions.

Originality/value

The surveys published in the literature try to determine the knowledge and attitude that students have regarding SD. However, this new questionnaire, whose validation process is described in this paper, aims to know how engineering students of the EIB perceive the level of insertion of SD in their academic programs, from a frequency perspective, and the importance they give to it, both personally and professionally, given to the analysis a holistic perspective. Thus, the questionnaire can be used by higher education institutions to design strategies for inserting SD in engineering studies.

Citation

Aginako, Z., Peña-Lang, M.B., Bedialauneta, M.T. and Guraya, T. (2021), "Analysis of the validity and reliability of a questionnaire to measure students’ perception of inclusion of sustainability in engineering degrees", International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Vol. 22 No. 6, pp. 1402-1420. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-09-2020-0355