Development of an instrument for measuring familial influence on Thai students’ choices of International Education

This paper reviews the construct and measurement of familial influence on Thai students’ choices of international education. It explains the development of the Familial Influence Scale (FIS) to measure five aspects of familial influence (finance, information, expectation, competition, and persuasion) on five choices of international education. The scale was tested for content and construct validity, and reliability (internal consistency). The three factors, ‘family communication’, ‘family interaction’, and ‘family fiscal influence’, were supported by varimax factor analysis and had reliabilities from 0.79-0.95. Use of the combined scales, as a general ‘familial influence scale’, was supported by principal components analysis; reliability for the combined scale was 0.92. Finally, the internal consistency of the scale was calculated by employing a testretest method to identify the reliability. The results indicate that FIS yields high internal consistency. Therefore, this scale is appropriate for the measurement of the influence of family on Thai student’s choices of international education.