Reliability and validity

Reliability is measured by Cronbach’s α coefficient and composite reliability (CR) coefficient, recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981). As shown in Table 2, the lowest value of Cronbach’s α coefficient in all variables is 0.792, which is above the minimum value of 0.7 recommended by Hair et al. (2012). Therefore, the reliability of all variables is ideal. The convergent validity was evaluated by two indicators’ factor loading and average variance extracted (AVE; Fornell and Larcker, 1981). Table 2 shows that the lowest values of factor loading and AVE in all measurement items are 0.544 and 0.555, respectively, both of which are higher than the recommended value of 0.5 suggested by Fornell and Larcker (1981). Therefore, all variables have high convergent validity. Finally, the discriminant validity is verified by comparing the square root of AVE and the correlation coefficient of each variable. The results from Table 3 show that the square root of the AVE of each construct is greater than the correlation coefficients, which meets the requirement for the existence of discriminant validity suggested by Fornell and Larcker (1981).

Discriminant validity test.

The square root of the average variance extracted (AVE) is in diagonals (bold); off diagonals are Pearson’s correlations of constructs. ^**p < 0.01.

Participant profile (N = 402).