Instrument development for investigating students’ intention to participate in online discussion forums: Cross-cultural and context adaptation using SEM

There is a need to investigate student intention to participate in online discussion forums in the context of online collaborative learning due to the importance of student participation and the widespread student inactivity reported in some studies. Student participation in online discussion forums could be predicted by the constructs included in the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). This paper presents a cross-cultural adaptation (CCA) and validation of a questionnaire based on TPB for analysis using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The CCA was conducted to adapt the English items included in the questionnaire for use in an Indonesian context. This is part of our study on factors that affect student intention to participate in online discussion forums. The rationale for conducting a CCA was the need to cater to the different characteristics of the language and the cultural backgrounds of the participants of this study in comparison to the participants involved in the construction of the original measurement items. The adaptation and the validation of the questionnaire involved a literature review, back-translation, an expert review, pretesting, and a statistical validation test to ensure its reliability and validity. The result shows that the adapted instrument is valid and reliable to be used for further SEM analysis (i.e., structural model evaluation). Moreover, this paper demonstrates that expert-reviewed adaptation and the back-translation method could produce valid and reliable measurement items for SEM. Therefore, future studies that utilize SEM with cross-cultural adapted items from relevant prior studies should consider adopting expert-reviewed adaptation and back-translation methods.