options. However, no study so far has used these measures.

Therefore, these measures

were used on an ad hoc basis for further verification of the proposed measure adapted
in this study.

The reliability and validity of measures have been proposed to be assessed by the plan
and procedures as suggested in the literature (Nunnally, 1978). As content validity
involves the subjective assessment of scale measures or characteristics of the included
variables (Malhotra, 2002), this was well defined and reflected a content domain
(Arino, 2003; DeVellis, 1991) in each construct measure. For this study, almost all
construct measures were derived from the close extant studies having a higher
reliability (not less than .70) consistency. The content validity of the questionnaire
was also overseen by a panel of five academic scholars. As Spector (1992, p. 47)
notes, “discriminant and convergent validities were frequently studied together and
involve investigating the comparative strengths or patterns of relations among several
variables”, thus these validities have been assessed and described in section 5.2.5 to
explore the ‘hypothesised relations between a scale of interest and other variables’
(Spector, 1992, p. 47).
Md._Abu_Saleh_Thesis 2006
The brief conceptual and operational definition, proposed relationships (hypotheses)
and domain of the measurement are summarised in Appendix-3. For measuring each
theoretical construct in the proposed model, the measurement variables are briefly
discussed below:

Trust – Trust is conceptualised as the importer’s/import manager’s perception of

their relationship with the supplier which tends to measure their attitude in terms of
honesty and truthfulness, reliability, openness, integrity, and monitoring of the import
supplier. As the operational definition specifies, five items (honesty and truthfulness,
reliability, openness, integrity) were extracted from Coote et al.’s (2003) study where
alpha reliability was reported as .88 and an additional item (monitoring of the import
supplier) from Wilson and Vlosky (1997) were adopted to fulfil the domain of the
measurement. The scale showed high construct reliability and was tested in the
similar dimension of study (Coote et al., 2003; Zineldin and Jonsson, 2000) and other
studies have used these items (Doney and Cannon, 1997; Mavondo and Rodrigo,
2001; Wilson and Vlosky, 1997). The questionnaire items are exhibited below.

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