Factor analysis for academic dishonesty tendency scale: Validation for Indian context

Honesty and integrity are highly valued qualities in a nurse. However, academic dishonesty has been a concern in nursing education consistently. A nursing student who exhibits dishonest behavior in classroom has a tendency to be also dishonest in clinical practice which can lead to adverse patient outcomes. There is paucity in studies on academic dishonesty among nursing students in India. There is also very limited evidence on which scale is valid or suitable to explore academic dishonest behaviours in an Indian setting specifically among nursing students. This paper addresses this gap by validating the suitability of the 'Academic Dishonesty Tendency Scale developed by Eminoglu and Nartgun to determine the tendencies of University students towards academically dishonest behaviors ' for a population of nursing students in India. 249 students enrolled in III and IV year BSc Nursing and I and II year MSc Nursing programmes in a private college participated in the study and filled the Academic Dishonesty Tendency Scale. The responses of the participants were subjected to factor analysis with Principal Components Analysis (PCA) with Varimax rotation and Kaiser normalization. Exploratory factor analysis was done to assess the applicability of the scale in the Indian setup. The three factors identified- Tendency towards Cheating, Tendency towards Carelessness and Tendency towards Plagiarism were found to be important aspects of academic dishonesty and are very relevant to nursing students. The findings confirm that the Academic Dishonesty Tendency Scale is a useful tool to identify tendencies towards academic dishonesty among nursing students in Indian settings.