Ambition to travel
A research study conducted to determine some of the factors that contribute to somebodies ambition to travel
A research study conducted to determine some of the factors that contribute to somebodies ambition to travel
The goal of this research study, was to determine what factors led to different people having higher or lower levels of ambition when it relates to traveling.
Prior to administering the validation study to the students, the items were evaluated by professors and other peers in the field of psychology to ensure it had both face and content validity. The items were then uploaded to the Qualtrics survey. After the items were uploaded, the students were instructed by their professors to go to the website to complete the survey. The students were first instructed to complete 5 demographic questions. These questions were followed by 22 Likert scale questions ranging from how likely they were to agree or disagree with the item. A “strongly disagree” was coded to equal 1 point, and a “strongly agree” was awarded 6 points. For the reverse coded questions, a “strongly disagree” was awarded 6 points and a “strongly agree” was awarded 1 point. The student’s response to these items were compiled and uploaded to SPSS to determine the validity and reliability of the study.
After calculating the descriptive statistics with SPSS it was found that there was no restriction of range biases. As for item difficulty, there were two items that had a celling effect. These were “I am interested in visiting new locations”, which had a mean of 5.32, and “I am open to new experiences”, which had a mean of 5.19. There was also one item which had a flooring effect, which was “I would never give up food for a day to travel somewhere”. This item had a mean of 1.9. The item-total correlations ranged from .291 to .693, which indicates that there was a lot of discrimination among the student’s responses. An optimal discrimination would have been between .6 to .8.
The studies Cronbach’s alpha for the item analysis was equal to 0.696. This infers that the results were moderately reliable, even though most research studies generally prefer a Cronbach’s alpha of a minimum of 0.7. If the item “I am content with never traveling the world” was deleted it would raise the Cronbach’s alpha to a 0.737 due to its corrected Item-Total Correlation was -0.460.
Face Validity:A psychology professor from Seattle Central Community College, Charles Jeffreys, and fellow peers from Washington State Universities psychology 412 class were consulted to test whether the validation study appeared to measure the construct “ambition to travel”. It was agreed by both parties that the test was suitable for the construct it measured.
Construct Validity:A factor analysis, in the factor analysis table below, was used to test if the survey measured the construct. It was found that the questions were moderately correlated between .1 and .25. From an individual item analysis, it was found that most items correlated positively with the construct. It was also found that the reverse coded questions correlated negatively with the construct which indicates that the finding from the survey were correct. The average of individual items was between 1.17 and 6.0, with standard deviations were between 0 and 2.828. The mean total score was 4.26, which indicated that on average most of the students had a moderate level of ambition to travel.
Social Economic Class:After completing an ANOVA, shown in the table below, it was found that individuals from the lower and lower-middle socio-economic classes were more susceptible to giving up resources if it allowed them to travel. For the item “I would give up food for a day to travel the world” participants who were from the lower and lower-middle socio-economic class both scored an average of 5.33 out of 6, while the upper and upper middle scored 3.5 and 4.71. For the item “I would give up water for a day to travel to my dream location” participants from the lower and lower-middle scored a 5.67 and a 5.44, while participants from upper middle, and upper socio-economic classes scored a 4.18 and 3.5. It was also found that for the item “I would be willing to sleep outside for a day if it allowed me to travel”, participants from the lower and lower middle scored a 6 and a 5.56 out of 6, while participants from the upper middle and upper only scored a 4.35 and 4 out of 6.
The purpose of this validation study was to measure the construct “Ambition to Travel”. The results found that it had adequate face and construct validity, but had low reliability. It was also found to have adequate item difficulty because there were only a few items with a ceiling or flooring effect. This validation study proves that this survey accurately measures the construct “Ambition to Travel”.
Another finding from this study was that after completing a one-way ANOVA, it was found that on average people from lower and lower middle social economic classes had higher ambitions to travel and would be more likely to give up resources than people of upper and upper middle socioeconomic classes. Previous research stated that people from upper socioeconomic classes travel more frequently and are more motivated to explore different geographic locations that they have not visited before due to having extra capital to sustain themselves. The findings from the study did not agree with these claims because it was found that people who haven’t had the opportunities to travel due to their socioeconomic class had higher ambitions to travel and would give up more resources if it allowed them to travel.
There were a few issues which limited the results and the amount of data that could be collect. Most of these discrepancies arise from demographic limitations.
Demographic Limitations:When collecting the data, the survey did not have access to a large sample of participants and was restricted to using psychology 412 students in two classes. Since there was a small sample size there was not a wide range of participants from varying socio-economic classes or ethnicities.
In future studies of “ambition to travel” it would help to increase the reliability by removing a few of the items with low Cronbach’s alpha scores. It would also be beneficial to have a larger number of participants from a wider population so that there will be more participants in each group we test. A way that we could do this is administer our Qualtrics survey to students from other universities or on a social media platform. In all, this analysis measured the construct of “peoples ambition to travel” and can also be used in future research studies to help determine why people from different demographics have varying levels of ambition to travel.