Understanding and predicting students' dishonesty: development of a measure of dishonest and unreliable behaviours

In this paper we present findings from a study that was designed, based on a cheating experiment conducted to a sample of 390 university students in an examination situation. We discuss the development of a local (Ugandan) measure of attitudes towards honesty, which can be used for assessing aspects of dishonest and unreliable behaviour among individuals. We hypothesised that individuals with favourable attitudes toward theft and other forms of dishonesty are more likely to be involved in dishonest acts. Results show that the measure that we developed is a valid predictor of a person's level of honesty and has significant correlations with other well known and validated measures of such personality profiles. Secondly, we hypothesised that individuals with low levels of socialisation, as measured by Gough's 1987 revised socialisation scale, or a history of delinquency, are more likely to be involved in dishonesty. The findings indicate substantial evidence for the above two relationships. By using the results obtained from the study, it is possible to identify items from the local honesty scale that can be used to identify more honest people and less honest ones. Keywords: academic honesty, cheating, honesty, socialisationJournal of Psychology in Africa 2005, 15(1): 81–87